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MY NOTE-BOOK 



PROFESSOR PHELPS' WORKS. 



THE THEORY OF PREACHING; or, Lectures on Homiletics. 

Cr. 8vo $2.50 

MEN AND BOOKS ; or, Studies in Homiletics. Lectures intro- 
ductory to " Theory of Preaching." Cr. 8vo 2.00 

ENGLISH STYLE IN PUBLIC DISCOURSE. With special refer- 
ence to the Usages of the Pulpit. Cr. 8vo 2.00 

MY PORTFOLIO. Collection of Essays. i2mo 1.50 

MY STUDY, and other Essays. i2mo 1.50 

MY NOTE-BOOK. i 2 mo 1.50 



MY NOTE-BOOK 



FRAGMENTARY STUDIES IN THEOLOGY 



AND SUBJECTS ADJACENT THERETO 



/ BY 

AUSTIN PHELPS, D.D., LL.D. 






WITH A PORTRAIT 




NEW YORK 
CHAELES SCEIBNEE'S SONS 
1891 



V v 






COPYRIGHT, 1890, 
BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 



/S.-Sjbo'f 



PEEFAOE. 



By far the major portion of every man's thinking 
is fragmentary. The best thinking of some men is 
so. They are seers of transient and disconnected 
vision. An educated man who practises literary fru- 
gality in preserving the ideas suggested by his read- 
ing, will find, after years of professional service, an 
accumulation of them, in which he will recognize 
some of the most robust products of his brain. Some 
of them will affect him with a sense of loss, because 
he has not been able to amplify them in monograph 
or volume. 

Some men find an outlet for such thinking in bril- 
liant colloquy. Their friendship is a literary treasure 
to other men. Hence have come such volumes as 
Eckermann's " Conversations with Goethe," and Cole- 
ridge's " Table-Talk." Others improve their moods 
of facile expression by recording their most sugges- 
tive fragmentary studies for their own gratification, 
or for future use. Hence we have such books as 
Pascal's "Thoughts" and Southey's " Commonplace- 
Book" and Hawthorne's "Notes." Occasionally such 
materials find their way into a literary mosaic of 



vi Preface. 

mingled philosophy and fiction, of which a master- 
piece is " The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table/' by 
Dr. Holmes. President Edwards once lamented an 
interruption of his morning studies, because it had 
expelled from his memory a single thought which he 
might never think again. 

These remarks are suggested by the origin and 
resources of the present volume. It is literally what 
its title indicates. Its contents are a selection from 
the accumulated memoranda of forty years. A por- 
tion of them have been partially developed and pub- 
lished in essays which are now out of print. A larger 
portion is made up of unpublished material. They 
make no claim to originality in any other sense than 
that in which every educated man's best thinking is 
original to Mm. It will be seen that in the selection 
I have often had in mind the necessities of young 
preachers in the early years of their ministry. With- 
out conscious plagiarism on the part of the author, 
these thoughts are offered to readers for just what 
they are, — " Fragments from my Note-Book." 

A. P. 

Bar Harbor, October 1, 1890. 



NOTE. 



The peculiar interest which attaches to last things 
belongs to these pages. 

A letter from his publishers, acknowledging the 
receipt of the manuscript of "My Note-Book," was 
the last which was read to my Father. Death, the 
great enhancer of values, had already touched him; 
and his work doth follow him. 

The duty of superintending the passage of this vol- 
ume through the press has fallen upon myself; but 
the service has been chiefly that of a proof-reader. 
His clearness of purpose, exactness of method, even 
the well-known beauty of that chirography which was 
always the delight of his printers, have made these 
labors as light as the anxiety to have everything as 
he would wish it may permit. The book was finished 
in every sense of the word by its author; and but 
few changes have been required of the text by the 
practical necessities of publication. 

To those who knew anything of his long illness, 
it is almost incredible that he should have labored as 
he did, to the utter end. Like any well man, he 
dropped at his post. 



Vlll 



Note. 



It is impossible that any word of mine can add to 
the tenderness or to the loyalty with which his old 
pupils and friends will use their final opportunity to 
study a new expression of his ripened thought and 
spiritual refinement. "If I can only live till this 
book is done, I shall be content to go," he wrote to a 
friend. When he could say this, — he who did not 
speak of his own work, and seldom of his own death, 
— it was time for God to grant him his wish. So it 
was given him. 

ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS WARD. 

Newton Highlands, Mass., 
November, 1890. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Fragmentary Studies in Theology (I.) ... 1 

II. Fragmentary Studies in Theology (II.) ... 27 

III. Fragmentary Studies in Theology (III.) ... 51 

IV. The Personality of a Preacher 79 

V. The Materials of Sermons 101 

VI. Methods and Adjuncts of the Pulpit . . . 132 

VII. Conscience and its Allies ........ 157 

VIII. Our Sacred Books 188 

IX. Theistic and Christian Types of Religious Life, 222 

X. The Future of Christianity 249 

XI. Methodism — its Work and its Ways .... 275 

XII. Miscellaneous Topics 296 

ix 



MY NOTE-BOOK. 



i. 

FRAGMENTARY STUDIES IN THEOLOGY. I. 

1. All good governments work largely on the 
principle of non-intervention. Other things being 
equal, that is the best government which most 
liberally lets subject or citizen alone. International 
law achieves its chief end if it compels nation to let 
nation alone. Federal republics forbid encroach- 
ment of State upon State, of county upon county, 
of city upon city. Municipal police prohibits 
intrusion of family upon family, of man upon man. 
The old English law which said, "Every man's 
house is his castle," delivered one of the first prin- 
ciples of civilization. Without it, civilization would 
not be. Parental government restrains trespass of 
child upon child, of servant upon servant. Through 
the whole range of authority, he governs best who 
governs least. 

2. It is marvellous, when we put our minds to 
it, how little government has to do with any of us. 
In the main drift of life we help ourselves, we 

1 



2 My Note-Book. 

attend to our own business, come and go as we 
please, fall by a law of elective affinities into soci- 
eties of kindred, of trade, of literature, of politics, 
and the thing which gives its solid cubic strength 
to civilized order is that no man says, Why do ye 
so ? When these things cease to be, we go to the 
almshouse or the penitentiary. There government 
pure and simple holds us in the clutch of power. 

The ultimate idea on which society at its best 
forms itself seems to be to insulate the individual, 
so far as may be needful, to enable him to live his 
own life, to build up his own fortune, to do his 
own thinking, to form his own opinions, to create 
his own character ; in a word, to be himself, come 
what may of it. Around this idea, all good gov- 
ernment revolves in concentric circles. The chief 
good which government achieves is to contrive how 
not to govern. 

3. Does not the same principle find more majes- 
tic evolution in the government of God? One of 
the first impressions, and the most durable, which 
we receive from the phenomena of nature is that 
of the non-intervention of the creative Mind. Hav- 
ing set the wheels of the universe in rotation, God 
seems to leave them to revolve by their own secret 
springs and with their own momentum. Whatever 
may be the occult fact at the centre of things, 
this is the look of them to our vision of the cir- 
cumference. The planets, so far as we know, are 
islands in an ethereal ocean, which no keel navi- 
gates. No electric cable has flashed a syllable of 



Studies in Theology. 3 

salutation from one to its nearest neighbor. And 
this is an emblem of the insular policy which 
appears to rule the relations of man to the laws of 
nature. He is left alone to adjust himself to their 
stupendous forces as he can. 

4. This policy of insulation is often tragic in its 
working. That does not induce its abandonment 
or suspension. Evil of appalling magnitude falls 
on men under the merciless operation of nature's 
laws, and God seems to look on in as merciless 
repose. Cities are devastated by conflagrations, and 
nations are decimated by pestilence, as if sentient 
beings were of no more worth than mushrooms. 
The earthquake at Ischia, a few years ago, buried 
two thousand people in a night, as if they were so 
many animalcules. Cyclones plough a furrow of 
death through a crowded population as if a city 
of human homes were of no more account in the 
universe than a beehive. A waterspout in mid- 
ocean sinks a ship in twenty minutes as if its 
immortal freight had no more dignity than an out- 
heap. A spark of fire which one raindrop could 
extinguish sets ablaze a railroad bridge at midnight, 
and in the morning the city of Peoria sends up a 
cry to Heaven, like that which went up from the 
banks of the Nile, when in all the land not a house 
stood in which there was not one dead. A father 
caught in a Western blizzard buries his little son 
in the snow, and lays himself down to die with 
apparently no friend in the universe more helpful 
than his Newfoundland dog. 



4 My Note-Book. 

5. So it looks to our blinking vision. Fire here, 
and snow there, the very elements which make the 
comfort and beauty of our winter homes, go forth 
at some voiceless bidding like angels of retribution. 
Some of these fatal phenomena appear to come to 
pass with no compensating good in the end. Of 
the reptilian species, some have been created for 
whose existence no reason can be given, it should 
seem, but a malign purpose. Among our fellow- 
creatures we discover cobras and rattlesnakes. 
God has concocted venom. He has contrived a 
marvellous animal machinery for its ejection. In 
consequence, twenty-two thousand human beings 
lost their lives in India in the year 1886. 

6. These symbols of evil accumulate, and catas- 
trophes pile themselves up in human history, and 
He who holds the universe in the hollow of His 
hand appears to hide Himself in some cavern of 
reserve. He sends out no countermands. He 
provides no reversals or suspensions of natural 
laws. So absolute is His concealment and so still 
is His footfall, that men plausibly ask, "Who is 
God? What is God? Where is God? Is there any 
God? How can He look on such colossal tragedies 
and be still?" 

7. Atheism finds its capital argument in the 
concealments and silences of God. The argument 
is by no means insignificant. We all find that 
within us which gave birth to the Egyptian Sphynx. 
We cannot deny that there is an abysmal depth of 
mystery in this Divine seclusion. Some inscruta- 



Studies in Theology. 5 

ble necessity exists for giving to the system of 
things as we look at it, on the under side of the 
universe, the aspect of a government of chance. 

8. Yet Christian believers are no more responsi- 
ble than other men for a solution of the mystery. 
Our sacred books do not create the facts. There 
they lie patent, not even between the lines of 
natural laws and their intersection with human his- 
tory. History and law make no secret of them. 
One system of religious thought is as much bound 
to respond to atheistic corollaries as another. If 
we have no response to give, we are all balked by 
the dread dilemma, " A malign God or no God ! " 

9. But suppose that we discover a law of non- 
intervention, operating by Divine decree, thread- 
ing the sinuosities of all government alike, and 
founded in the nature of the things concerned. 
Suppose that without it man cannot be a man in 
the fulness of Divine ideal. Do we not discover 
at least one glint of light playing over the abyss of 
mystery, which but just now was the very black- 
ness of darkness ? Especially does it illumine many 
of the dark things occurring under natural law, by 
disclosing for them a moral reason. It is a step 
in a triumphal march into the reasons of things 
when for a natural evil we can discern a moral 
cause, or declare a moral fact as the reason why. 

10. It should not surprise us then if we find the 
principle of non-intervention in God's moral gov- 
ernment. In the probationary administration of 
this world He certainly appears, within a limited 



6 My Note-Book. 

range of working, to have chosen an insular policy. 
The isolated locality of the globe which we inhabit 
necessitates, as it respects the rest of the popu- 
lated universe, a moral seclusion. Who knows 
what auxiliary alliances might be available for 
our moral security if no impassable gulf held this 
world aloof from our brethren of the stars ? In 
size and astronomical conditions the earth seems 
to be vastly inferior to Jupiter. That planet may 
be as magnificently its superior in the rank of 
quality and moral force of its population. What 
protective battalions of spiritual power might we 
not summon to our aid in crises of the conflict 
with evil, if the insulation of the planets could be 
suspended ! 

Every human mind too is a walled city. Its 
gates are closed at will to every fellow-mind. 
Silence barricades its history against the world. 
An autocracy of moral government administered 
by a Divine vice-regency is going on within its 
insulated realm. Who knoweth the spirit of a 
man ? One criminal at the bar of human justice 
can defy the judicial inquisition of an Empire. 

11. Pursuing into details man's discipline by 
seclusion, we discover evidences of an intricate 
yet well-defined plan of God, in many things to let 
him alone. He accumulates and interweaves, lim- 
its and extends his own habits. No other than he 
is permitted to fashion the mould of his own char- 
acter. He it is who holds supreme command of 
ante-natal tendencies and inherited conditions, 



Studies in Theology, 7 

No power from outside puts constraint upon his 
birthright of moral freedom. His is the strategy 
which brings to pass its conquests and its failures. 
His very opinions are largely the creations of his 
own will. He sees what he chooses to see. No 
amount of evidence for truth or falsehood is irre- 
sistible. Fichte says : " We do not will as we rea- 
son ; we reason as we will." For weal or for woe, 
man must work out his own destiny. It is fixed 
as the order of the stars. He must be himself 
whatever may come of it. This appears to be the 
law of probationary conditions. 

12. The severity and constancy of temptation, 
so far as we can see, make no break in the Divine 
laAv of non-intervention. Every human life, in 
one aspect of it, is one prolonged temptation. 
Probationary government would be a nullity but 
for this constitutional element of temptation. The 
thing which makes it what it is, is temptation. 
Without this, it might be existence ; it might be 
education; it might be growth; but it could not 
be probation. This sinister factor in man's des- 
tiny often coils itself secretly in his pathway, and 
in some forms it springs upon him with the sud- 
denness and the venom of a rattlesnake. 

13. A singular resemblance exists in the devel- 
opment of evil, between the natural and the pro- 
bationary governments. So striking is the likeness 
that natural phenomena are the most truthful 
emblems of probationary catastrophes. God often 
suffers evil to grow to its malign maturity in the 



8 My Note-Book. 

two departments of matter and of mind alike, 
with no counteractive force from Him in either. 
The argument therefore is one of exact analogy. 
The brunt of it is this : why should not the same 
principle which we find so abundantly and often 
so disastrously working in the kingdom of nature 
be looked for in the moral kingdom ? 

14. A historic example will emphasize the argu- 
ment. Many years ago a tidal wave on the coast 
of Norway buried a score or more of human 
homes. It sent cradles with their sleeping freight 
out to sea at midnight. Infinite benevolence did 
not " scotch " the wheels of planets and their satel- 
lites to forestall the tragedy. Why may not the 
same benevolence see reasons for refraining from 
placing let or hindrance in the way which a human, 
being on trial for eternity has chosen to his own 
hurt? Who knows enough of God's realm of 
reserve, wherein are stored infinite things and 
infinite reasons of things, to affirm that it may not ? 

Who knows that man's moral personality may 
not depend upon such non-action on the part of 
God? Who knows that he can be a man, full- 
grown, of finished character, of crystallized virtue, 
consolidated and secure through all the coming 
cycles in his loyalty to God without some such 
experience of moral isolation? Who has ever 
penetrated the concealments and silences of God 
far enough to discover that non-intervention on 
His part is not as just, as wide, as good, in the one 
phenomenon as in the other? 



Studies in Theology. 9 

15. An incident in natural history is strikingly 
emblematic of certain facts of probationary gov- 
ernment. 

The geographical text-book of our schools fifty 
years ago contained a rude woodcut, representing 
an anaconda coiled around the body of a passing 
traveller, whose life-blood it was crushing out. It 
was a picture of peril in the wilds of South 
America. When the scene there pictured took 
place, infinite wisdom did not interpose to stifle 
the murderous appetite of the reptile. Infinite 
benevolence did not send a shaft of lightning to 
paralyze its contractile muscles. Reptile and man 
were left to fight their own duel. The chances 
were hideously in favor of the reptile. 

Why may not the same wisdom and benevolence 
have reasons inscrutable, perhaps inconceivable, to 
us, for standing aloof while temptation springs 
upon a man in his youth and coils itself in evil 
habits around his manhood, and crushes out all 
good from his nature in the end? Why may not 
the purposes of probation require that, within a 
certain range of destiny, tempter and tempted shall 
be left to fight their own duel ? Why should it 
stagger our faith if fearful chances are on the side 
of the tempter? Who is learned enough in the 
secret ways of God to say that this cannot be ? 

16. Observe the analogy on a broader scale, of 
more terrific significance and moral suggestion. 
Between A.d. 250 and A.d. 262 a pestilence raged 
over the whole Roman Empire. From Egypt to 



10 My Note-Book. 

the Hebrides and from the Hebrides to Egypt, 
forth and back and forth again, under laws of 
nature which were then more mysterious than 
eclipses, epidemic death trampled the nations in 
its fury. Believing men saw in it the avenging 
angel of the Apocalypse. Unbelievers beheld in 
it a maniacal Fate. Both took it as a sign that 
the world was drawing near its end. Medical 
science was paralyzed. Men died like flies. Gib- 
bon says that statisticians of the succeeding age 
estimated that half the human race perished in 
those twelve years. In some of the Italian cities 
from three-fourths to four-fifths of the population 
disappeared. Neither wisdom nor benevolence from 
on high interposed to roll back the tide of death. 
Then occurred one of the awful concealments of 
God. Men sought Him the world over and He 
was not found. Men were struck down in the 
very act of fasting and prayer for His discovery. 

17. Why then may not the same benevolence 
and wisdom retire into more fearful hiding when 
nations rage in the fury of their passions and rot 
in the ulceration of their vices? Why may not 
non-intervention on the part of God be as wise, as 
just, as good in the one case as in the other? 
Are moral causes and effects ruled by laws so 
widely diverse from those of nature ? Who knows 
that? Where is the proof? Who has explored 
the realm of Divine reserve far enough to discover 
the fact? Let philosophy explain, in its relation 
to moral laws, the destruction of half the world 



Studies in Theology. 11 

under the Roman sway, and we can explain as 
philosophically the antediluvian corruption for 
which God repented that He had made man upon 
the earth. 

18. The analogy between the two kingdoms is 
impressive in another feature of Divine proced- 
ures. Non-intervention in the administration of 
probationary discipline is intermittent in its devel- 
opment. We discover it here and not there, now 
and not then. An element of sovereignty is visi- 
ble. He hath mercy on whom He will have 
mercy. But neither is the principle in question 
uniform in God's methods of procedure under the 
laws of nature. There, too, it is intermittent. 
In her treatment of man Nature is very kindly in 
some things ; in others she is very cruel. In some 
phenomena we call her " Mother Nature." In 
others she exhibits her fangs and the spring of a 
tiger. Our own poet sings of the " stern mother- 
hood of the sea." The picture as a whole is one 
of mingled light and shade. It is a work of chiaro- 
oscuro. 

19. In like manner, in probationary discipline, 
God interposes the suasions of truth and grace to 
balance and often to overbalance the forces of 
temptation. Yet again He retires apparently into 
close-barred seclusion, and the tempter has his way 
with the tempted in ruin and desolation. Even in 
the supreme disclosures of Divine love an occult 
necessity seems to exist, that redemptive decrees 
shall be so executed as to put on the look of a 



12 My Note-Book. 

government of chance. One is taken and another 
left. If, then, the one system expresses wisdom 
and benevolence, why not the other? Who is the 
expert so accomplished in knowledge of the Most 
High that he can venture to affirm that it does 
not? 

20. We call the Divine silences mysteries, and 
they are such. Yet this principle of non-interven- 
tion is not entirely inexplicable even to our pur- 
blind vision. A certain cognate principle gives us 
a hint of the possible — may we not say probable ? 
— explanation of it in part. It is that in all the 
departments of God's government we detect signs 
of aspiration. His wisdom is not content with a 
creation of low grade. His beneficence is not sat- 
isfied with products of inferior quality. Always, 
in the final outcome He aims at best things. 

21. This element of Divine aspiration may 
underlie, w;e know not how broadly or profoundly, 
the mystery of non-intervention in moral govern- 
ment. Here as elsewhere it is to be presumed, 
and we discern it in evidence, that God aims at a 
creation of superlative excellence. He deals in 
supreme things. He is not content with a universe 
of imbeciles. His ideal would not be realized in a 
race of moral dwarfs and cripples. Infantile being 
is not His ultimate thought. Innocence is not His 
supreme model. A universe of lambs and hum- 
ming-birds and ring-doves might be that. He aims 
at the production of a race of beings who shall be 
susceptible of character, of diversified character, of 



Studies in Theology. 13 

robust character, of self-contained, self-reliant, crys- 
tallized character, — character at once consolidated 
and pure. What else can be the object of proba- 
tionary discipline? 

22. Who then knows enough of the occult and 
complicated and hereditary processes by which 
God devolops to its maturity the character of a 
moral universe to say that it can realize the ideal 
of Divine aspirations, without a discipline con- 
ducted to a greater or less extent in moral insula- 
tion? Who can affirm, and give infinite reasons 
for it, that insular planets, and untraversed oceans, 
and undiscovered continents, and races segregated 
by contrasts of color, and nations walled apart by 
confusion of tongues, and tribes alienated by in- 
vincible antagonisms, and minds shut into bodies 
which tell no secrets, and reserves of speechless 
thought, and powers of silence which do not yield 
to rack and thumb-screw, even capabilities of 
concealed virtue and latent guilt, are not in the 
nature of things essential conditions of a moral 
system which shall realize its Divine ideal, and 
bring to pass its ultimate possibilities of being and 
endeavor ? 

Again, who knows that man can be a man, de- 
serving to bear the image of his Creator, if he is 
not, in some of the conditions of his moral trial, 
let alone to exercise his moral sovereignty, and 
develop his godlike personality by himself? One 
must be very knowing in the reserves of God's 
thoughts, in which the infinite reasons of things 



14 My Note-Book. 

interplay before one can say yes or no to such a 
stupendous inquiry. 

23. Critics of Bishop Butler's "Analogy of Re- 
ligion to the Constitution and Course of Nature " 
have objected to its masterly argument, that it 
proves nothing but the crass ignorance of man. 
The same criticism may lie against all our reason- 
ings upon the partial non-intervention of God in 
human destiny. It is true, they begin and end 
with an interrogative. The chief thing we know 
is that we do not know. In researches into the far- 
away interior of the Divine economy, the discovery 
of our ignorance is the discovery of a great deal. 
To know that we do not know is to know much to 
the purpose. 

24. From such a discovery practical corollaries 
follow. It follows that we must not condemn a 
system of things of which we Jc?iotv nothing. This 
stands to reason. It follows that we must not 
distrust a Being in procedures of which we know 
nothing. This stands to justice. A truism covers 
all such investigations into the ways of God. It 
is that a realm of the unknown, fathomless, and 
boundless lies athwart our track of inquiry. Its 
phenomena and its laws may be inconceivable by 
human faculties, and therefore unknown. They 
may be inexpressible in human dialects, and there- 
fore unrevealed. 

In that impenetrable realm, God revolves the 
infinite possibilities of creation. There is His king- 
dom of reserve. There is the place of His hiding. 



Studies in Theology. 15 

There is the cause of His silences. Our province 
is to stand on its border, ourselves also in believing 
silence. We believe what we do know ; we are 
silent upon what we do not know. Our knowledge 
is infinitesimal as compared with our ignorance. 
We reproduce in our researches the experience of 
Newton gathering his few pebbles on the shore of 
an untraversed ocean. 

25. In our treatment of the principle of non- 
intervention in the Divine government, the fact 
should be emphasized that the phenomena on 
which the principle is founded cannot be denied. 
They exist whether we can solve their mystery or 
not. They need no proof. Silence and history 
are surcharged with them. 

Moreover, they are among the elementary teach- 
ings of our experience of the world we live in, and 
of the system of things which encloses us. We 
very soon discover the fact that the Divine gov- 
ernment, in both the natural and the moral king- 
doms, is threaded by an element of tragedy. Its 
lurid lines cross and recross the map of every 
human life. An infant on whose mundane exist- 
ence the sun rises and sets but once does not 
escape the sinister decree. It comes into the 
world, the unconscious herald of suffering. It 
goes out of the world under a law of pain and 
dissolution which is itself a stupendous war upon 
nature before which all generations of men have 
stood aghast. 

We must concede these facts to be facts indis- 



16 My Note-Book. 

putable. We must admit also, that, considered 
by themselves alone, they give a malign aspect to 
the system of things in which we live and of which 
we form a part. So much, be the consequence 
what it may, must be conceded by an honest be- 
liever to an honest Atheist. No moral intuitions 
are of any avail to set aside the facts in question 
as non-existent. The line of denial is the line of 
absurdity. To say, as one objector has done, 
" Proof or no proof, it is not true," is insane. 

26. Moreover, it is unwise policy to ignore 
these phenomena by burying them in a bottomless 
abyss of mystery, and leaving them there. This 
is the disposal made of them by many devout 
believers. The facts are stolidly let alone. 

A Professor of theology in the city of New 
York, on an occasion which brought before his 
theological class for discussion one of the recondite 
problems now in question, said in substance : " I 
have a bag of incomprehensibles in which I de- 
posit all such inquiries unanswered. I store them 
there; affirming nothing, denying nothing, believ- 
ing nothing." He might consistently have capped 
the climax, as a free-thinking President of a col- 
lege in South Carolina once did, by adding, " and 
caring nothing." 

27. The dictum of the theological seer expressed 
the mental habit, perhaps of the majority of believ- 
ers when confronted with the " dark things " in 
which God seems to have retired into a kingdom 
of oblivion. To many, that which they call their 



Studies in Theology. 17 

" faith " appears to be reverently expressed by this 
unreasoning trust. But this is not faith. It is 
intellectual lethargy. It presupposes shallow think- 
ing and flabby moral fibre. In every highly organ- 
ized character there are certain robust graces to 
which it is a laxative and a destructive. 

28. The working of such inert and stolid faith 
in the conflict of Christianity with Atheism is still 
more disastrous. It is treacherous. It permits 
atheistic bravado to beg the whole question of the 
Divine existence. Atheism revels in these unsolved 
enigmas. The alternative with which it plausibly 
blocks the way of the Christian argument is : " A 
malignant Creator or no Creator." The human 
mind, if pressed by this dilemma, will never hes- 
itate long in its election. None but a frenzied 
conscience ever made obeisance to a malign Deity. 
As intelligent Theists then we must say something 
of these repellent anomalies which no sane man 
can deny. What shall we say for the faith that 
is in us ? 

29. A few thoughtful minds find relief from the 
sinister look which the " dark things" of Nature 
and of Providence give to the government of God, 
in the doctrine of a " Pre-existent State " of which 
the phenomena in question are a disciplinary 
sequence. 

Of this hypothesis, several things may be briefly 
noted. One is that the fact of an ante-mundane 
life in the history of man is at best, in the formula 
of Scotch jurisprudence, " not proven." A second 



18 My Note-Book. 

is that till the memory of somebody renders it a 
practical fact if it is proven, we can afford to wait. 
A third is that as a possible hypothesis it is no 
solution of the mystery. It only shows the problem 
one stage farther back in the history of the moral 
universe. It leaves our obstinate questionings 
unanswered, and in darkness as compact as ever. 

A fourth is a fact which one whispers under 
breath. It is that, with profound deference to the 
retrospective and far-seeing thinkers who find repose 
in this anomalous theory, one cannot rid oneself of 
the sense of a certain comical incongruity involved 
in it. A truthful theory in religious thought con- 
firms its truth by the dignity of its associations of 
theory with fact. Tried by this test the hypoth- 
esis of an ante-mundane period in the history of 
man must be accepted, if at all, under an aesthetic 
protest. 

30. Here, for example, is a new-born infant who 
by the conditions of the hypothesis may as probably 
be ten thousand years old as ten minutes. The 
memory of man runneth not to the contrary. Now 
is it credible that this pitiable puny creature — 
this homoeopathic attenuation of moral being — 
this microscopic iota of thinking power — express- 
ing less intelligence than a semicolon, and in 
action immeasurably less than a honey-bee — is 
it conceivable that this yet nameless thing which 
we call "It" — has come into this world bending 
under the colossal burden and the unrivalled 
honor of such a venerable antiquity? Which 



Studies in Theology, 19 

element preponderates in such a discovery in 
anthropology — the improbable or the risible ? 
Shall one controvert it or smile at it ? 

31. Passing from hypothesis to facts, we find 
much to the purpose of relieving the dark things 
of nature and of providence in the discovery that 
they are diminutively exceptional in their occur- 
rence. They are not the prevailing expression 
of the Divine Mind. The}' are but a fragment of 
the warp and woof of the plan of the universe. 
Neither do they present the look of eager design. 
They do not appear as if God delighted in them 
for their own sake. Where do we find in them 
the profusion which we discover in the beauty of 
this world's adornments, and the sublimity of its 
nocturnal skies? The terrific shock which they 
give to our sensibilities is largely the shock of 
contrast with their magnificent and beneficent 
surroundings. 

32. Artists tell us that paintings in mezzotint 
should be set in golden frames. In the material 
world something like this is witnessed in the ac- 
companiments of the shocking phenomena evolved 
by the forces of nature. Those mysterious aliens 
to the work of a benign Creator are set in the 
framework of a world of exceeding beauty. The 
first impression and the last that is made upon the 
mind of a philosophic observer, is that in its orig- 
inal and Divine ideal this world was meant to be a 
happy world. So far as should be in keeping with 
its moral design as the arena of a probationary 



20 My Note-Book. 

government and of the recovery of a fallen race, it 
was designed to be the abode of beings dwelling 
in communion with God, 

He who out of His own serene consciousness 
evolved a world of such exceeding loveliness, and 
then planted in the soul of the being to whom He 
gave dominion over it the Greek idea of Beauty, 
must be a benign Creator. So have men reasoned 
from the beginning, and so will they reason till the 
end. 

33. It is in the lap of such a world that we dis- 
cover the few anomalies, thrown in as if at random, 
which put our faith on trial. So infinitesimally 
exceptional do they appear, that on the broad and 
long scale of observation, a devout looker-on can- 
not help exclaiming, " He hath made everything 
beautiful in His time." True, the exceptions are 
dark — very dark. To one who will have it so 
they make their author look evil-minded. Yet a 
moss rosebud is a triumphant respondent to them 
all. Is an African desert a blotch on the face of a 
world of beauty ? Aye, but how much more re- 
splendent is the moral idea conveyed by the daisy 
which was foreordained to bloom there for the 
glazing eye of Mungo Park ! 

34. The supreme argument in the Christian 
theory of the mysteries in question is discovered 
when we lift them up into the plane of their moral 
uses. God's ultimate designs are moral designs. 
His ultimate reasons are moral reasons. There- 
fore, we always let in some glint of light on a por- 



Studies in Theology. 21 

tentous development of evil when we can find a 
moral aim in the use of it by Divine adjustments 
and counteractions. 

For example, of all the phenomena in human 
destiny, no other is of such abysmal blackness as 
the phenomenon of death. Does it not then give 
dignity to our sacred books that they discover a 
moral significance in this primal curse? They 
record a credible narrative of its origin. They 
tell us of its symbolic meaning — why it has been 
and must be, and by whose benignant conquest it 
will be blotted out. They make it a memento of 
a great moral catastrophe. As an incident to the 
discipline and the symbolism of a fallen w^orld, it 
is dense with moral design. As an incident to the 
recovery of a redeemed world, it is luminous with 
Divine benignity. Thus it is that by interpreting 
shocking and mysterious phenomena as devices of 
moral government, and symbols of a history of sin, 
we discover somewhat of God's mini in them. 
We find that they have moral uses which make 
them worthy of God — even Godlike. 

35. To appreciate the full significance of the 
principle of moral usefulness in stupendous evils, 
we must revise the popular notions of the purpose 
of God in man's creation. Those notions often 
assume that the goodness of God is facile good- 
nature and nothing more. The supreme design of 
man's creation is to make him happy, and nothing 
else. To open a new magazine of outflowing joy 
in the universe is the aim by which Divine good- 



22 My Note-Booh. 

ness gratifies and satisfies its creative wisdom. 
The act is rather an impulse than a purpose. But 
we engulf ourselves in intractable confusions if we 
conceive of no more exalted aim than this in an 
act so sublime as that of giving existence to an 
intelligent and deathless spirit. 

36. In the Divine ideal of him, man is not only 
a sentient being. He is not an intelligent and 
immortal being only. He is a moral being. And 
in a moral being there is an object more worthy of 
God than happiness. It is character. The grand 
design of man's creation is the development of 
grand character. And grand character is by its 
very nature the product of probationary disci- 
pline. The man must grow into it and up to 
the level of the loftiest possibilities which his 
nature can carry. This he must do by thinking 
grand ideas and believing grand principles and 
lifting his will-power into grand endeavors. He 
must encounter and master trials which in the 
Divine decree are grand opportunities. He must 
"lift himself above himself" into the grandeur 
of godlikeness by self-conflicts which bring the 
strain of infinite and eternal verities close home 
to him. 

Such in the nature of things is the law of buoy- 
ant ascent into moral sympathy with God. One 
auxiliary to that ascension is the strain put upon 
faith by encounter with mysteries of evil and 
shocks of suffering. 

37. A fragment of Biblical story will illustrate 



Studies in Theology, 23 

the principle here developed. When the Arabian 
patriarch lay between the anvil and the hammer 
of God's discipline, he cried out in a paroxysm of 
choleric despair, "Am I a crocodile?" Such is 
the amended reading of the word which our 
English Bible translates by the word "whale." 
Whales were not known on the banks of the 
Nile ; crocodiles were. The mind of the suffer- 
ing patriarch seized upon the monster of the 
river — the only thing he knew of that seemed 
to him in keeping with the merciless treatment 
which he appeared to himself to be receiving 
at the hand of God. No; he was not a croco- 
dile ; he was a man. And God was true to the 
eternal purpose of his creation — to make a man 
of him. 

38. A spirit of aspiration has been observed as 
a characteristic of God's wisdom in His moral 
designs. In that spirit God did not fashion the 
patriarchal model on a life of ease and affluence 
and social dignity as its background. " The 
greatest of all the men of the East " in the Divine 
ideal of him was not realized by the ownership of 
" seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, 
and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred 
she-asses, and three daughters and seven sons, and 
a very great household." The least in the king- 
dom of Heaven was greater than all that. Divine 
methods of discipline were aimed only at best 
things, — the noblest, the most Godlike, and the 
fittest for an endless life. 



24 My Note-Book. 

To this end God summoned auxiliaries. A 
cyclone, a shaft of lightning, a horde of guerillas, 
a termagant wife, and diabolical ingenuities of tor- 
ture were His instruments. These He commis- 
sioned under that law of which this is the first 
mention in history, by which calamities come in a 
crowd. Not otherwise than by such diverse 
severities of discipline, rushing in fleet-footed 
succession, could the finished and consolidated 
character be fashioned which should realize the 
Divine conception of what an Arabian patriarch of 
the olden time ought to be. 

39. Whatever else this ancient epic was designed 
to teach, it illustrates incidentally the principle 
that runs through all the heroic methods of moral 
government, in which God aims at a revolutionary, 
often a convulsive, uplifting of a human character 
by the discipline of suffering. A finished charac- 
ter of lofty type, and specially a character rich in 
the virile elements which make great men, pre- 
supposes conflicts with mystery and throes of 
anguish. Heroic believers become such by the 
ministry of heroic pains. 

40. To appreciate in its complete emphasis the 
principle of moral value in things evil, we need 
furthermore to revise popular notions of the dignity 
of faith. Faith — what is it as an element in 
highly organized character ? Many conceive of it 
as a neutral grace, the dignity of which is pro- 
portioned to its inertia. It has only the lunar 
beauty of a passive virtue. 



Studies in Theology. 25 

But its superlative type in finished character can 
be no such imbecile thing. Rather is it an athletic 
virtue. It is panoplied with elemental principles 
of truth. It is rooted in the deep things of God. 
It has robust, oaken qualities. A man never attains 
to the jubilant working of a believing spirit until 
a certain element of heroism is wrought into the 
springs of his being. This must be the fruit of 
heroic, disciplinary training. 

41. By any and every means an immortal spirit 
must be set to thinking. It must think responsi- 
bility with profound and eager moral conscious- 
ness, A great faith must feed on great mysteries. 
The sinews of its strength must grow tense and 
wiry by the strain of great conflicts. Many need 
the discipline of great searchings after God in 
which they do not find Him. Some must agonize 
in prayers which in the seeming are dead failures. 
Not otherwise can some natures grow into that 
massive and consolidated virtue and that masterful 
solution of religious problems which shall fit them 
for their predestined place as powers of control in 
God's plan. 

42. Just here it is that the appalling catas- 
trophes in which Divine non-intervention appears 
to leave men so frigidly to themselves, develop 
singularly benignant uses. Welcomed by a docile 
spirit, and used by an alert one, they brace up the 
tone of a believing soul. They inject a firmer 
tension into holy will-power. They plant courage 
at the roots of fears. In all things that go t/ r . 



26 My Note-Book. 

develop in a man God's image, they work in the 
wake of God's beginnings. In all minds which 
are thoughtful enough to grapple with such 
mysteries, they tend to develop the force and 
grandeur of a great liberty. 



II. 

FRAGMENTARY STUDIES IN THEOLOGY. II. 

1. Reasonings like those contained in the pre- 
ceding pages need to be enforced by the fact that 
we are set upon an intense strain of life here, antic- 
ipatory of a more intense sequel in an endless 
future. This allotment is not restricted to men of 
regal endowments who are created for great des- 
tinies. It is the common law of common life. 
Said an illiterate Catholic woman, speaking of a 
bereavement which had set her mind to thinking 
into the underground of her dim creed, " Such 
things make us see what we are here for." 

That one hint from the Holy Spirit thrust 
underneath the forms of her Church touched the 
whole secret of the endless life. Science and phi- 
losophy in their most far-reaching adventures into 
the mysteries of providence make no more pro- 
found discovery. We are here, not only " to be, 
but to become" Everything made or done here 
is organized for migration. It is like the anatomi- 
cal structure of birds of passage. Everything has 
wings. 

2. We discover also a moral significance in that 
feature of suddenness, by which many dark phe- 

27 



28 My Note-Booh. 

nomena in nature and in providence shock men 
into affrighted silence. Abruptness is an awful 
factor in probationary training. Men hear invisi- 
ble monitors saying, " Be still and know that I 
am God." It is the only monition they can hear 
or heed. How fearfully is this illustrated in the 
annals of certain families ! Some homes are 
shadowed by tragic histories. Without herald, 
cold, cadaverous fingers have written on their 
walls. 

3. In our modern civilization there is an unwrit- 
ten discipline by the telegram. Do not afflicted 
men and women often forebode evil at the sight 
of one? Do not some who have been elected 
to a tragic experience, often say in the night- 
watches, " After this, anything may happen ; 
nothing can be reserved in God's silence which is 
so shocking or so improbable as to take us by sur- 
prise"? 

4. Family history sometimes undergoes a revo- 
lutionary change, like that which occurs in crises 
of a nation's life, in the displacement of civil law 
by martial law. After a long period of serene 
prosperity there comes suddenly an interval of 
rigor and desolation. The angel of the scourge 
alights at the door. Affliction follows hard upon 
affliction. The prattle of children is hushed at 
noonday. The beauty of young maidenhood is 
laid low. For years the habiliments of mourning 
are not laid aside. Yet sudden calamities, even a 
fleet-footed succession of them, may give to a 



Studies in Theology. 29 

human life its most central depth of meaning, as 
preliminary to an endless career of moral enter- 
prise in other worlds. 

5. One of the perils against which an undisci- 
plined being whose destiny looks out upon un- 
known cycles, may need a protective discipline, is 
that of surprisal into apostasy from God. In this 
world sin often springs upon unconsolidated virtue 
from ambuscades of evil. Men are overborne by 
the spur of the moment. Who can tell what mul- 
tiplied encounters of that kind may lie in the end- 
less pathway of one whose loyalty is not compacted 
by a solidifying and protective discipline here? 
There as here God works by means. He begins 
far back in the infancy of being. Then as now 
the perseverance of the saints may be vitalized 
by moral forces accumulated in this life. That 
may be the thing which many of us "are here 
for." 

6. Is it not obvious that future crises of moral 
peril will be met and mastered with most secure 
and concentrated virtue, by those who have been 
schooled into moral repose by events which have 
given a shock to their whole moral being ? Said 
an English colonel in India, " In the first charge 
of my cavalry in battle, I always tremble into 
courage and self-collection." So, a godly charac- 
ter, in some of those immortal types which men 
need to carry into Eternity, grows to its destiny 
there by means of such disciplinary shocks to moral 
inertia here. Their suddenness is the chief element 



30 My Note-Book. 

in the discipline. Courage to give grows undei 
the blows it takes. 

What other probationary devices, then, can give 
to character this reduplication of conscious strength 
more effectively than those which inject into life 
the catastrophic element of its training? This is 
a thing of which no man can know anything worth 
knowing but his own experience. It cannot make 
a transit from one man's life to another. Charac- 
ter can carry no trace of it into Eternity but thai 
which the man himself has lived through. 

7. Real life discloses another fact from which 
reappears from another phase of rigor and necessity 
the moral value of the phenomena now under con- 
sideration, as probationary expedients. It is that 
some men do not work their way to any overmaster- 
ing sense of God's existence till they have known 
what it is to be God-forsaken. In this, as in many 
other phases of moral growth, a sense of necessity 
generates a sense of reality. We have what we 
must have ; no more, and no other. 

8. There is a supreme faith, which some have 
inaccurately defined as "the consciousness of God." 
More correctly stated, it is a conscious union with 
God, in sympathy with His thoughts and sensi- 
bilities and eternal purposes. It is an experience 
which often works by reactions. In one swing of 
the pendulum the occult force is generated which 
starts its opposite. Faith springs by a rebound 
from unbelief or from despair. It may grow, 
therefore, out of that moral solitude in which 



Studies in Theology. 31 

prayer creates only a sense of orphanage. God 
appears to have retired beyond the reach of sup- 
pliant voices. 

9. Probationary schooling by that awful seclu- 
sion works directly into line with the necessities 
of certain minds. Its moral uses are sometimes 
disclosed in the training of elect spirits for elect 
services. In some cases it is the training which 
discovers the election. Men are put upon the 
track of their life's mission by the strain laid upon 
them in the discipline preparatory to its achieve- 
ment. Pre-eminent saints and elect forerunners 
have often commenced their careers under a crush- 
ing sense of personal abandonment by God. They 
were orphans in a desolate universe before the 
Fatherhood of God illumined their pathway. 

10. The two great departments of theological 
thought, — those of natural and of revealed relig- 
ion, — in the general trend of many of their teach- 
ings, lie on substantially parallel lines. At certain 
points of proximity, the one crosses over into the 
domain of the other. Especially is it true, that 
the grandest and toughest inquiries of natural 
theology find their most luminous responses in the 
disclosures of Revelation. 

11. Such is the fact in the case here brought 
under review. The consciousness of the loss of 
God is created by some of the most common va- 
rieties of affliction. The discipline suggests an 
opportunity for a solemn and tender fellowship 
with Christ. This may be the prerogative of all 



32 My Note-Book. 

believing souls who are called to an exceptional 
intensity of trial. Our crucified Lord endured the 
discipline in question in an extreme unequalled in 
any other human sufferer. He could not otherwise 
compass the culmination of His atoning pains. He 
could not find it in His heart to say, in the dawn- 
ing consciousness of the reward set before Him, 
" It is finished ! " till He had first passed through 
that blackness of darkness in which all that He 
could say of filial trust in His Father and ours was 
that climax of all human anguish, "My God! 
My God ! Why hast Thou forsaken Me ! " 

12. Probably no other problem suggested by 
the mysteries of evil in the Divine government 
presses with such cold, leaden weight upon the 
popular thought as that of the inquiry, " Where, 
under the law of non-intervention, is the place for 
prayer ? " 

Everywhere. The law of non-intervention 
does not abrogate the law of prayer. The conceal- 
ments and silences of God do not restrict the 
range of its operation. Whatever will explain any 
instance of unanswered prayer will explain every 
instance which to human vision appears to occur 
in consequence of Divine seclusion. Like every 
other law, that of non-intervention is but one of the 
expressions of Divine decree. It covers only those 
probationary experiences which are foreordained 
by the will of God. Moral solitude is one of His 
chosen conditions of moral trial. He is no more 
oblivious of its working than of that of the law of 



Studies in Theology. 33 

gravitation by which the sparrow falls. Nor is 
there any more mystery in its phenomena than in 
those of the laws which fix the orbits of the stars. 

13. To the popular mind the most transparent 
conception of the relations of prayer to Divine 
decrees may be founded on the image of the Divine 
government as a network of laws. To human vis- 
ion laws run parallel with laws. Laws cross and 
recross the grooves of laws. There is a Law r of 
Light, which regulates its undulations to the fron- 
tiers of the stellar universe. So is there a Law of 
Prayer, by which as grandly and as benignantly 
and as far away in the stretch of human thought, 
God adjusts His responses and His silences, His 
self-disclosures and His concealments. Each and 
every one is His eternal purpose. The innumera- 
ble reticulations of their interplay are but the rhyth- 
mical utterances of His will. Not one controverts 
another. Not one tangles or suspends another, 
even in appearance, but at His bidding, and for 
reasons infinite which make it seem good in His 
sight. 

14. There is an illusion in practical astronomy 
which may serve to illustrate the complication of 
laws with laws in the administration of the Divine 
government. To the naked eye the orbits of the 
stars seem to cross and recross each other at angles 
and right angles, which bring them into perilous 
convergence. To an inexpert observer it would 
appear that contradictory attractions must bring on 
abrasions and jostlings and collisions. The heav- 



34 My Note-Book. 

ens, as they look on an astronomical map, appear 
as if they must some day be crowded with the 
wrecks of dislocated worlds. A cyclone in the sky, 
in which Orion and Cassiopeia and the Pleiades 
should be hurled crashing and ablaze into chaotic 
space, is not an impossible catastrophe. One touch 
of retributive decree upon the law of gravitation 
might bring it to pass. Yet the sidereal universe 
moves in such exactest order, that no sign of minut- 
est friction even has appeared from the beginning 
until now. 

15. The explanation is that the stars are not 
located on one extended plain as they appear on a 
celestial map. Some are at such unmeasured dis- 
tances in the rear of others, that immense spaces 
intervene between them, when to our vision they 
are less than one inch asunder. There is and 
can be no foreclosure of orbit upon orbit, and no 
ejection of planets from their spheres till the heav- 
ens shall be rolled together. 

16. Every Autumn witnesses a beautiful illus- 
tration of this astronomical fiction. To the naked 
eye the planets Jupiter and Venus appear to be 
approaching each other. Evening after evening 
the intervening space is abridged by instalments 
till it dwindles to a cipher. Yet at the hours of 
their nearest approximations the actual astronomi- 
cal distance between them varies from four hun- 
dred and thirteen millions to five hundred and 
forty-seven millions of English miles. Ample 
space this, it should seem, for morning and even- 



Studies in Theology. 35 

ing stars to come and go without perilous inter- 
volution of their orbits or dislocation from their 
places. 

17. This is a sufficiently accurate emblem of the 
complication, which is not contradiction of laws 
with laws, and of decrees with decrees, in the 
administration of the moral world. The look of 
contradiction is an illusion. It is caused by a fore- 
shortening of perspective by our contracted range 
of vision. Ultimately it grows out of the contrast 
of the magnitude of God with the littleness of 
man. 

18. We flee therefore when no man pursueth if 
we are intimidated by discoveries of science which 
the wise men tell us leave no room for prayer. 
Just as unreasonably do we quake at the shocks 
and heavings of natural forces against the moral 
decrees of God. It is yet to be proved that a 
cyclone cannot be forestalled by believing prayer. 

19. When the question confronts us, of conflict 
between spiritual and material powers, both acting 
by laws which are the very breath of God, we 
need to be very intelligent in our wisdom or very 
modest in our assertions. The wise men are 
neither, when they assure us that they have risen 
in their might, and have driven prayer beyond the 
confines of a respectable universe. We ourselves 
are neither, when we are scared out of the birth- 
right of Christian believers, by mysteries of evil, 
and shocks of suffering which we do not com- 
prehend. 



36 My Note-Book. 

20. Suggestions of an overruling Mind in 
human history are found in the concealments of 
Nature and of Providence. 

The hiding of the American continent till a new 
world was needed for the further development of 
the race ; the concealment of certain metallic 
mines till the financial resources of commerce 
required their discovery; the burying of anthra- 
cite and petroleum till other means of artificial 
heat and light were approaching the point of 
exhaustion ; the silence of the clouds respect- 
ing the occult forces of electricity, till near the 
time when mechanical invention rose to a level 
with the discovery; England's ignorance of the 
value of her coal and iron mines, till they became 
indispensable to her advancement to imperial rank 
as the bulwark of Protestantism and of civil liberty ; 
the delay of the manufacture of paper from the 
pulp of vegetable fibre, till the time when the 
practical value of the art of printing depended 
upon it, — these are signs of a comprehensive and 
far-reaching plan of history. It antedates and 
outlives the forecast of any human mind. 

21. Wise men have often observed the singular 
marriage of invention to discovery, and of dis- 
covery to invention ; sometimes the one and some- 
times the other being the senior in the order of 
time — but without which in union, human prog- 
ress would have suffered a deadlock. Discovery 
stimulates invention with prophetic forecast. Every 
great epochal event in history is brought out of 



Studies in Theology. 37 

the arsenal of the ages by a law of predestination. 
It comes when it must come. It is as if "He who 
made the lock knew where to find the key." 

22. To conceive and to execute such a plan of 
critically significant events and agencies and com- 
binations must have been the work of some other 
intelligence than that of man. William Pitt, when 
he heard of the victory of General Wolfe on the 
" Heights of Abraham," said, " The more a man 
is versed in the history of nations, the more he 
sees of the hand of an overruling Providence 
everywhere." A devout student must observe the 
same in the discoveries of science and the history 
of invention. Man has executed them, but some 
other Mind than that of man has timed them. 

23. Supernatural agency in human affairs is 
forcibly suggested by the mysterious supremacy of 
right over wrong. We often reason as if this were 
an intrinsic necessity in the nature of things. 
Where is the evidence of that? Who has ever 
proved it ? In a world which has lapsed into sin, 
the very contrary is the " nature of things." By 
the innate law of character, by which it perpet- 
uates itself, and reduplicates its forces, in such a 
world as this, the wrong should rise and the right 
go down. Such is the drift of moral gravitation. 
Character once set on a downward plane has in 
itself no recuperative force for a return. What 
it is, it will be, till remedial power controls it from 
without. 

24. Yet, on the grand scale of trial, right is 



38 My Note-Book. 

never defeated, but by a colossal inequality of 
numbers and resources. In the wrestlings of races, 
if it has anything like an equal chance, right 
never goes under. Moderate majorities never 
crush it. Reverses never put it out of average. 
It has become one of the axioms of reform, that 
God works with minorities. In the conflicts for 
human liberty, and the rise of despised races, right 
has always triumphed with a minority behind it. 
When majorities come to its support, they consist 
largely of reluctant multitudes, who are drawn 
over to it by the suction of events. They come to 
its defence when it needs no defence. They do not 
support it — it supports them. 

The most philosophical solution of the paradox 
is the Christian disclosure of a remedial system 
which brings supernatural powers into secret alli- 
ance with men in the execution of the purposes of 
God. Our mundane atmosphere is thronged by 
them. But our eyes are holden that we may not 
see them. 

25. The same truth is more signally suggested 
by what are called " the fortunes of war." 

Why is it that of all the great operations of 
men in masses of physical potency war is the most 
uncertain ? Why do victories occur in defiance of 
all visible probabilities ? Why is it that Provi- 
dence, so often, is not on the side of the strongest 
battalions ? Why do reverses often contradict all 
calculable chances ? Why do panics make cowards 
of veteran brigades ? 



Studies in Theology. 39 

The science of war gives no satisfactory solu- 
tion of such problems. The great Captains of all 
ages have confessed the insoluble mystery, unless 
Napoleon, who exalted the " strongest battalions," is 
an exception. Yet no hero in military history was 
a more conspicuous illustration of the truth than 
he. He declared at St. Helena that the most 
astounding surprise in his career was the failure of 
the campaign in Russia. At Dresden, on his march 
to Moscow, when a half-million of soldiers, the 
majority of them veterans, were at his command, 
he said that every military forecast of events gave 
him assurance of success. By the laws of war, 
which had been the study of his life, it was im- 
possible that he should fail. Why did he fail ? 

26. No other hypothesis explains the class of 
events to which the contradictions of the " fortunes 
of war" belong, so philosophically as the biblical 
theory of the intervention of supra-mundane auxil- 
iaries, who march under orders unheard by us. 
Our atmosphere is a non-conductor to the sound 
of their movement. 

27. The first thing which shook the confidence 
of Napoleon in his " strongest battalions," after 
crossing the Russian frontier, was the devout tone 
of the intercepted despatches of the enemy, and 
of the appeals to the Russian soldiery. The rec- 
ognition of other than human allies was a factor 
in the problem for which the Napoleonic theory of 
war had made no provision. The destruction of 
the hosts of Sennacherib between the evening and 



40 My Note-Book. 

the morning twilight — a hundred and eighty-five 
thousand strong — was of a piece with countless 
phenomena in military history, which no other 
force accounts for but that of the " Angel of the 
Lord." 

28. The triteness of the beauty of the material 
universe renders us insensible to the symbolic tes- 
timony which it gives to the moral perfections of 
God. The blunt antagonism between right and 
wrong might have been symbolized by things re- 
pulsive and uncanny. The rectoral and retributive 
goodness of God is symbolized by volcanic fires and 
the tragic severity of the laws of nature. But the 
holiness of God has a serene beauty which demands 
more tasteful emblems. It could not have been 
inscribed on a world destitute of colors. Heavens 
void of stars could not have expressed it. Benig- 
nant virtues require for their emblematic painting 
things of exceeding loveliness in earth and sky. 
The wondrous exuberance of God's benignity de- 
mands a corresponding profusion, even an apparent 
waste, of things fascinating to eye and ear. 

29. We find that in this mood God has created 
the heavens and the earth. Tropic flora, cascades, 
and rippling brooks, sunsets, and the dawn of 
morning, humming-birds and orioles, and a con- 
stellated firmament are the natural concomitants 
of a world which is the handiwork of One whose 
name is Love. The fitness of things is specially 
witnessed in the fact that the most significant 
symbols of His character are the most common. 



Studies in Theology. 41 

We do not have to search for them in the arcana 
of science. They are not stored in cabinets of 
natural history. The very clouds over our heads 
on a summer day can scarcely take on other con- 
figurations than those which artists love to paint. 
The smoke from the chimneys of our winter 
homes assumes the form of spiral wreaths, the 
beauty of which poets sing. The winning attri- 
butes of God require and receive for their sym- 
bolic utterance a magnificent and ornamented 
globe which the sun gilds and the moon silvers, 
and the stars greet. One such vision of His glory 
as that of Jungfrau at sunset, as seen from Inter- 
laken, gives one an emblem of His benevolence, 
which lives in memory forever. 

30. Agnostic educators do not appreciate the 
loss they inflict on the culture of the young by elim- 
inating from its moral elements the idea of a per- 
sonal God. As a power developing and uplifting 
the human intellect, what other conception within 
the range of human thought is its equal ? What 
other idea puts significance, as this does, into the 
phenomena of natural science ? Without it, moral 
science does not exist. Nothing else philosophi- 
cally interprets human history. Nothing else so 
magnifies and ennobles literature. The great 
bulk of human libraries, so far as their educating 
power over the human intellect is concerned, is 
nullified when the idea of a personal God is ex- 
punged. No act of vandalism is so frightfully 
destructive to the interests of culture as that of 



42 My Note-Book. 

uprooting the natural faith of childhood in the 
Divine existence. The conflagration of the Alex- 
andria Library was but a spark in the comparison. 

31. Our age deifies its material prosperity. We 
stand in awe, almost up to the level of worship, 
before the marvels of invention and discoverj r . 
Wise men put them in a nut-shell by saying that 
all that civilization had achieved for the welfare 
of mankind before the last fifty years, does not 
equal its triumphs during this half-century. 
Measured on the scale of material advancement, 
it may be true. But the real civilizing forces which 
have made the world what it is to-day are not such 
things as steam and electricity. We are not civil- 
ized by our command over the law of gravitation. 
Nations are not made great by Atlantic cables and 
Pacific railroads. The civilizing powers in all 
history are Ideas, not things. Of these the reg- 
nant forces are religious ideas; and of these the 
one supreme power is the idea of a personal Crea- 
tor. A soldier in Cromwell's army struck the key- 
note of everything in history which lives and wears, 
when he said, " The best courages are but beams 
of the Almighty." 

32. A large literary assembly happened to be 
convened at a semi-centennial anniversary on the 
day on which the tidings reached this country that 
the first Atlantic cable had brought an intelligible 
message from the eastern to the western shore of 
the ocean. 

Mind had at last traversed three thousand miles 



Studies in Theology. 43 

of the under-world of the sea without sail, or 
steam, or keel to navigate it. At the word, the 
entire audience sprang to their feet. At first, 
cheers rent the air. But the sober second thought 
of the whole assembly was the request that a ven- 
erable clergyman who was present should lead 
them to the throne of grace in prayer. The idea 
which lies back of every great causal fact or event 
in the history of civilization is the idea of God. 
Well is it for human culture that the Theistic 
instinct of the race is so obstinate in its demand 
for a personal God. Literature and philosophy are 
beneath the average of civilized thinking when 
they blink the idea of personality in their notions 
of a Supreme Being. In such repudiation of spir- 
itual cognitions wise men take a long stride 
toward barbarism. The popular mind of any civil- 
ized people is wiser than they. 

33. To a working theology in the pulpit, certain 
elements are indispensable. They are freedom 
from self-contradictions ; consonance with the in- 
tuitions of the human mind ; a comprehensiveness 
which shall forbid omissions of essential truth ; a 
perspective of doctrine which shall give pre-emi- 
nence to Christian ideas as related to those of 
natural religion or those of the Old Testament; 
harmony with the Scriptures as a whole, and as 
the intelligent popular mind reads them ; and 
statement in such forms as shall carry intense con- 
victions corresponding to the necessities of a mind 
awakened to the exigency of sin. 



44 My Note-Book. 

34. The initial fact in all theology, as it is in 
all religious thinking which is truthful in its adap- 
tations to human life, is the fact of sin. The con- 
sciousness of sin is an intense experience. In the 
order of time it is probably the first development 
of conscious moral being. Man first knows him- 
self as a subject of moral government in the intui- 
tion of his moral sense that he is a sinner. In the 
order of nature, that intuition is intensified by 
time. The process of deliverance from it involves 
immeasurable cost in suffering and death. Praise 
for recovery from it is ecstatic. Therefore the 
forms of faith which shall meet the conditions of 
the Christian pulpit must carry the most profound 
and exalted ideas which the human mind can con- 
ceive. Such the redemptive ideas are, in their full 
significance. 

35. Theology adjusted to the uses of the pulpit 
emphasizes a quadrilateral of doctrines which in- 
tensify each other, and give character to all the 
rest which enter into the system of Christian be- 
liefs. These are the depravity of man as the Gos- 
pel finds him; his exposure to retributive suffering 
in a future life ; the necessity of his regeneration 
by influences of the Holy Spirit ; and the depend- 
ence of pardon as a judicial act of the Divine gov- 
ernment, upon the sufferings and death of Jesus 
Christ. A preacher's personal faith in any one of 
these will measure his working faith in the rest. 
The intensity of his faith in them all will measure 
the force of his ministrations as a whole. In the 



Studies in Theology. 45 

popular thinking they need to be held in an equi- 
librium which shall make each an auxiliary to the 
others. Essential error can scarcely find a lodge- 
ment in the popular theology if this equilibrium 
is kept intact. 

36. Errors, like truths, grow and decay in the 
religious convictions of a people, in clusters. A 
single error is never long insulated. Its cognate 
group is soon developed. That the germ of a sys- 
tem of beliefs is an error, sometimes is not proved 
except by its reproductive affinities with kindred 
errors. A belief, like a man, is known by the com- 
pany to which it gravitates. New ideas in theology 
may be tested by the reception given to them by 
the enemies of the old. When alleged improve- 
ments of an ancient faith are greeted with loud 
applause by its hereditary opponents, and gratula- 
tions on deliverance from bigotry fill the air, those 
improvements are probably illusive. Prove all 
things ; hold fast that which is good. 

37. When an ancient faith is caving in, the most 
sagacious judges of the drift of opinion are often 
found among those who have long watched the old 
faith with an evil eye. They know by heart the 
process of transition from the old to the new. The 
snapping of ancient ties is familiar to them. The 
pioneers in a revolution of opinion are apt to be 
very honestly insensible of the tendencies they 
have evoked. The ultimate developments surprise 
and grieve them. 

38. This was affectingly illustrated, if report be 



46 My Note-Book. 

true, in the mental history of the Chief of the 
Unitarian defection from the popular theology of 
New England. Dr. Channing was a man of trans- 
parent mental integrity. His theology was not 
of speculative origin. Professor Stuart, his chief 
opponent in the controversy of the times, revered 
him as a devout believer to whom the faith he 
held was a life. It was not possible for such a 
man to wander from the faith of his fathers in a 
somnambulistic dream. Every step of the way 
was doubtless trodden in tears. He lived long 
enough to discover the ultimate extremes to which 
the revolution he had evoked was rapidly hasten- 
ing. And if common fame spoke truth, his closing 
years were clouded by the vision. 

39. When a great truth is dislocated from its 
socket in the popular theology, the danger of its 
absolute and final overthrow is proportioned to 
its intrinsic dignity. It is as if one should pry up 
a boulder on the summit of a mountain and send it 
bounding to the valley. The velocity of its de- 
scent is proportioned to its weight. So of an 
imperilled doctrine in the faith of a people ; the 
more massive it is, the more potent are the forces 
which must be set to the work of lifting it from 
its place. Therefore the more sure is its fall, and 
the more disastrous is the ruin which its fall evokes. 

40. It is remarkable with what unerring aim 
a false departure in theology, starting anywhere, 
reaches the central doctrine of the atonement in 
the sweep of its forces. Error achieves no fatal ruin 



Studies in Theology. 47 

till it gets possession of that citadel of the faith. 
Consequently, begin where it may, its march 
thither is prompt and swift. The chief object for 
which men need a faith is to determine the prob- 
lems which the experience of sin creates, and the 
atonement of Christ solves. A tangent in theology, 
to reach its resultant, must pursue that line in its 
divergence. 

41. The principle above stated was emphatically 
illustrated in the case of Dr. Channing. There is 
reason to believe that his departure began with 
the doctrine of endless retribution. His original 
belief of that doctrine is indicated by a discourse 
reprinted in 1885. If it were reproduced now in 
a Calvinistic pulpit, it would shock the sensibilities 
of our times as his own were shocked by what 
seemed to him a ferocious discourse upon that 
truth in his childhood, probably preached by the 
Rev. Dr. Hopkins. 

It is not unnatural that the animus of such a 
discourse should have concentrated on that doc- 
trine his first secession from the stern faith of his 
fathers. Yet that did not occur till a short time 
before the delivery of the celebrated discourse at 
the ordination of the Rev. Jared Sparks in Balti- 
more. In that brief period he had learned to con- 
ceive of the scene of the atoning sacrifice of Christ 
as the central scaffold of the universe, without 
which the wrath of God could not be appeased. 

42. This sympathetic decadence of faith in the 
atonement, when any other one of the great f unda- 



48 My Note-Booh. 

mental truths of evangelical theology falls, is en- 
tirely germane to the laws of theological belief. 
From such premises it is a foregone conclusion. 
The irresistible drift of error at the circumference 
is to advance by the nearest radius to the centre. 
A mind of such resolute integrity as that of the 
Unitarian Chief could not long retain its youthful 
trust in a vicarious sacrifice for sin by the Son of 
God, when its faith in the endlessness of retribu- 
tive inflictions for sin had been abandoned. The 
same underestimate of the evil of sin, and miscon- 
ception of its nature, was at the root of both sur- 
renders. Such is the welding of doctrine with 
doctrine in the Christian system of beliefs. 

43. The evil of single errors in religious think- 
ing is commonly underrated. Few popular maxims 
are so mischievous as that which affirms that it is 
of little moment what a man believes, if he acts 
his belief honestly in real life. A man is saved, 
not by his belief, but by his life. But to live an 
error is to live a falsehood. The Father of lies 
does nothing worse. It is as true in the construc- 
tion of a religious creed as in the ethics of private 
life, that one lie necessitates another. To act one 
error consistently must ultimately reduce every- 
thing in moral beliefs to error. An honest con- 
science does not essentially better it in the end. 
Character thrives on nothing but truth. " The 
true and the good are one thing. Mind has no 
natural affinities with falsehood. A false idea, 
honestly held and lived, is to the moral nature 



Studies in Theology. 49 

what a cancer is to the human body. It is an abso- 
lutely foreign and malignant growth. Pure blood 
never creates it. Like a cancerous humor, its ten- 
tacles strike inward from the surface to the vitals. 

44. That was a capital remark made by the 
Rev. William Jay of Bath: "The doctrine of 
election is true, but it is not of equal importance 
with that of the perseverance of the saints. We 
must distinguish not only between truth and error, 
but between truth and truth." 

45. In one aspect of it, theology is cathedral 
architecture. It is a structure in which truthful- 
ness depends on perspective and proportion. The 
most sinister errors are distortions of truth — often 
only extremes of truth. Some such have grown 
out of the hyperbole of Christian song. Ancient 
hymns transmuted into didactic form became 
prayers for the dead and to the dead. That 
element of personal character which men call 
"level headed" is essential to truth in the popular 
thinking. 

46. Therefore, error which is plausible as a 
preacher delivers it, is often reduced to caricature 
as the people think it. That which to him is onlj^ 
a moderate foreshortening of perspective becomes 
in the popular conception a monstrosity. This is 
illustrated in the probable origin of the worship of 
saints in the clerical eulogies of the dead in the 
early centuries of the Church. 

47. It may be an open question, therefore, of 
homiletic policy, whether at a given time an 



50 My Note-Booh. 

improvement in the popular thinking is worth its 
cost in the peril of distortion which it must 
encounter in the process. Advances in popular 
beliefs come more naturally by imperceptible and 
unconscious growth than by a dead lift from 
inherited beliefs. Growth in character is always 
growth of thinking power. Belief thrives on faith. 



III. 

FRAGMENTARY STUDIES IN THEOLOGY. III. 

1. The laws of heredity have significant theo- 
logical relations to the Fall of Adam, which 
students of those laws lose much by ignoring. In 
real life, all things which express and forecast 
human destiny run in grooves of inheritance. 
Everything that creates history runs in the blood. 
Ante-natal prepossessions are at the roots of things. 
Disease is not more obviously or radically affected 
by physical heredity than moral character and its 
sequences are by the same principle in moral 
destiny. Many of the most mysterious phenomena 
of life are in exact keeping with the fact of a 
moral catastrophe in the infancy of the race. They 
are more philosophically explained by the history 
of Eden than by anything else. How otherwise, 
for instance, can the universal sinfulness of the 
race be accounted for ? 

2. Animal suffering has melancholy complica- 
tions with the question of Divine benevolence. Dr. 
Arnold of Rugby said that it was so fearful in its 
apparent implications that he dared not discuss it. 
Many animals themselves protest, at the sight of 
the blood of their species, by a sound which nothing 

51 



52 My Note-Book. 

else evokes from their dumb natures. No hy- 
pothesis explains the phenomenon of animal suffer- 
ing and death but the Biblical history of the lapse 
of the ruling race of this world from moral recti- 
tude. The law of moral correspondence between 
matter and mind requires that the abode of a 
fallen being and the fellow-creatures who serve 
him shall sympathize with and symbolically repre- 
sent his moral character. What he is as a moral 
being must be declared by sympathetic suffering. 
The whole mundane system must be set in accord 
morally with its fallen lord by the symbols of 
pain. The very rocks and mountains must bear 
traces of buried histories of pain. Fallen man 
must see himself reflected in the woes of subaltern 
species, and in the shock which his fall has given 
to the solid globe itself. 

3. Every central doctrine of the Gospel has 
collateral uses. We could not afford to part with 
the truth of the Deity of Christ, were it valuable 
for nothing else than the vividness which it has 
imparted to our conception of the personality of 
God. The whole structure of our faith rests upon 
certain grand demonstrations of personal identity. 
Man, a person — accountable to God, a Person — 
redeemed by Christ, a Person co-equal with the 
Father — regenerated by the Holy Spirit, a Person 
of equal dignity in the Godhead, — these are its 
corner-stones. The tendency of all the ethnic 
religions has been to confound and obliterate these 
representations of personality. The tendency of 



Studies in Theology. 53 

Biblical thought is to exalt and intensify them. 
The prime illustration of this in its impression on 
our minds is found in the Deity of Christ. 

4. It is impressive to observe the ingenuity 
with which the human mind has expressed its 
interest in the atoning sacrifice of Christ. No 
other single thought, unless it be the thought of 
death, has taken equal possession of the Christian 
world. It abounds even in the literature of Chris- 
tian fable. A mediaeval legend represents that at 
the festival of Easter, all the lambs on the globe 
are thrilled with thanksgiving to the Saviour of 
mankind for having put an end to their suffering 
as the type of His. The conception may have 
been a puerile fancy in its original setting. The 
mediaeval mind had a rare knack in loading with 
puerilities sacred things and persons. Yet the 
legend never could have had form except in an 
age and in countries in which the Christian idea 
of an atonement had taken supreme rank in the 
common mind. Men must think it intensely 
before they will put it into the mind of animals. 
It marks the climax of devotional inspiration, that 
men invoke the dumb world to aid them in its 
expression. 

5. Do not the words of our Lord in St. Matthew 
18:7 give us a hint of all which it is given us to 
know of the problem of the Divine permission of 
sin ? " It must needs be that offences come ; but 
woe to that man by whom they come." Two prin- 
ciples are involved here which appear to cover 



54 My Note-Book. 

the awful mystery. One is that, as related to the 
power of God, there is in the nature of the things 
concerned some mysterious necessity from which 
moral evil springs. That is to say, the preven- 
tive power of God cannot exclude sin from the 
best system of the universe administered in the 
best manner. To the Divine Mind, its existence 
belongs not to the kingdom of design, but to the 
kingdom of the inevitable. The other is that 
the responsibility for moral evil rests upon finite 
moral being. 

These facts interpreted, each as correlative to 
the other, point to the nature of the best possible 
moral system as the cloudland in which the mys- 
tery of sin lurks. Its prevention in any creation 
of moral beings which should be worthy of God, 
and therefore morally right as the object of His 
creative wisdom, was in the nature of things im- 
possible to Him. Like change in the immutable 
relations of numbers, it was one of those blank 
impossibilities to which infinite power sustains no 
relation. The phenomenon of sin, therefore, argues 
no more disparagement to the character of God 
than the phenomenon of pain in an ulcerated tooth. 
Things inevitable in nature prove no wrong in 
character. 

6. The contingencies involved in moral freedom 
are appalling to contemplate if not balanced by 
Divine promise in the form of immutable decree. 
In one who has been redeemed from the catastrophe 
of sin this correlation of opposite truths forms the 



Studies in Theology. 55 

only ground of moral stability. The wavering 
debility of conscience, the consequent weakness of 
virtuous habit, the paralytic tremulousness of will, 
and the intermittent integrity of intellectual judg- 
ments tend to create trepidations and alarms. 
These, again, threaten apostasy. Such a being, 
though regenerate, if left to himself at the starting- 
point to which regeneration introduces him, must 
live on the defensive till the end. His life is a 
state of siege in a granite castle. Aggressive enter- 
prise is impracticable without the panoply of a 
Divine alliance. In a fallen world if in no other, the 
stability of virtue in the long process of recovery 
requires the protective force of changeless decrees. 
Freedom and election form one of those dual 
weldings of balanced forces by which the redemptive 
system is adjusted to the exigency of a fallen mind. 

7. It would be difficult to number the controlling 
minds in history who have been predestinarians. 
Men who have scouted the truth as dogma have 
been constrained by the stress of events in real life 
to recognize it as fact in their own persons. So 
extensive is this faith among the great executives 
who have created history, that it argues some inborn 
infirmity or some acquired obliquity in the growing 
of such a mind, if the man does not discover the 
truth dawning upon his consciousness before he 
passes the ridge of middle life. 

8. The discovery of personal foreordination is 
not restricted to any one class of those who have 
been organizing forces in human affairs. Reformer^ 



56 My Note-Book. 

and founders of sects like Luther and Mahomet, 
statesmen like Sir Matthew Hale and the Duke de 
Choiseul, generals like Cromwell and Napoleon, 
philosophers like Socrates and Spinoza, painters 
like Fra Angelico, and sculptors like Danneker, 
heroes of adventure like Havelock and Gordon, — 
all come upon common ground in this consciousness 
of having been chosen by a Power above the plane 
of their own being to a destiny of achievement 
planned by no wisdom of theirs in its origin, but of 
which they have been the executives. Men who 
have believed this with no religious consciousness 
have, if possible, been more obstinate in the con- 
viction than their Christian peers. The doctrine 
of Election which is so transparently taught in the 
Scriptures is as clearly the teaching of grand 
biographies. 

9. This faith in personal predestination is a 
necessity to the normal working of the very first 
order of public men. Without it, born leaders and 
forerunners do not climb to the summit of their 
faculties. They do not otherwise grow into the 
inspiration and the conscious ownership of their 
supreme prerogatives. By no other means do they 
command that repose in great endeavor which 
elect men need. In other words, to accomplish 
their mission on any masterly scale of enterprise, 
men must find out on an equal scale of discovery 
that they have a mission. They must have a sense 
of eternal allotment to it which in its inspiring and 
.propelling force is equivalent to prevision. 



Studies in Theology. 57 

10. Seldom does a man perform a work of signal 
value to the world without the existence of pre- 
monitory hints of it in his personal training. The 
man is made for his work, and the work is pre- 
ordained for the man. The man and the work 
come together by irresistible affinities. The whole 
process is threaded by Divine foreknowledge and 
decree. The youth and early manhood of one who 
is elected to the performance of even a single great 
thing in the advancement of mankind are never 
devoid of tokens of Divine prescience and antici- 
patory discipline. The strategic providence of 
God inserts into the early development of such 
men hints which symbolize the great history to 
come. What such a man does is foreshadowed in 
the training which makes him what he is. The 
being and the doing are an equation. It is not in 
the power of any man to lift his life's work above 
his character. If he seems to do it, it is but a 
seeming. It is a mirage. Always and everywhere 
the saying of Goethe holds good, " If you would 
create something, you must be something." 

11. More even than this is true. A man's ante- 
natal history often gives intimation of some elect 
service for which he is to be created. To this law 
belongs the fact so well known that remarkable 
men commonly have remarkable mothers. At 
birth rivulets of vitality come to a junction 
from fountains unsealed by a Divine hand for a 
Divine purpose. The best work which a man ever 
achieves in this world lies in the grain. The hand 



58 My Note-Book. 

which made him lays down the grooves of his use- 
fulness. 

12. When God has in His kingdom of reserve 
a great thing for one of His chosen to achieve, He 
does not often disclose the fact of the consciousness 
of the man himself, till the time comes for the 
execution, or afterwards. The " Paradise Lost " 
was a rare exception. The best work of this world 
is, as a rule, done by unconscious instruments. 
To them and to lookers-on, the fact that they are 
elect instruments is an afterthought. The most 
frequent sayings of wisest men are unconsciously 
said. Immortal proverbs which tell the wisdom 
of the ages are fortunate hits. We seldom know 
their origin. 

13. Poetry is the most profound theology. The 
Psalms of the Old Testament disclose a more pen- 
etrative insight into the Mind of God than the 
Epistles of the New Testament. The hymnology 
of the Church has expressed more of the immeasur- 
able depths of truth than her creeds. Our great 
historic confessions are religious life in the work 
of inquiry, of debate, of action. But when we 
mount to the heights of inspired devotion, or seek 
God on death-beds, we turn to the treasury of 
Christian song. 

14. A test of new departures in theology is 
found in the inquiry, " What is their bearing upon 
the practical work of the Church for the world's 
conversion ? " Tried by this test, the recent theo- 
logical adventures in New England present very 



Studies in Theology. 59 

grave problems to Christian thinkers. Those ad- 
ventures go to the root of Christian missions, 
as we have known them for nearly a century. In 
two respects they involve disastrous changes in 
our well-known theory of missionary enterprise. 

15. One of these is a denial of the necessity 
of a knowledge of Christianity in the present 
life to the salvation of unevangelized nations 
in the mass. The conviction of that neces- 
sity has taken a profound hold upon the faith of 
the Church. Upon it the magnificent structure 
of Christian missions has been erected. We have 
accepted without abatement the Scriptural teach- 
ing that mankind, as the Gospel finds them, are 
" dead in trespasses and sins." It has been to us 
a stupendous and appalling fact. We have not 
theologized about it so profoundly as we have 
believed it. We have taken it soberly to heart. 
We have found in it an imperative reinforcement 
of our Lord's command to preach the Gospel to 
every creature. 

16. We have sent the Gospel therefore to the 
benighted nations as their forlorn hope. What- 
ever may be true of the minority of exceptional 
enlightenment, we have acted in the belief that, 
without a knowledge of Christ the majority of the 
heathen go into eternity unsaved. It may be 
reasonably doubted whether without this convic- 
tion a Christian mission to the heathen would ever 
have existed to this day. We cannot know that it 
would ever have been commanded. At any rate, 



60 My Note-Book. 

this is the appalling theory on which it has been 
commanded and executed. 

17. Recent discussions in theology are threaten- 
ing to overturn all this. Revolutionary change is 
in the air. It is claimed that the ancient notions 
respecting the destiny of the heathen are unworthy 
of broad and noble conceptions of the character of 
God. By some it is more than hinted that the 
ethnic religious, antedating Christianity in their 
origin, are, in their providential design, preparatory 
to its coming. They have been its forerunners 
and pioneers. So far they have been its auxil- 
iaries in their working. Some do not hesitate to 
affirm that they contain truth enough to constitute 
a saving power to the nations which have inherited 
nothing better. Not exceptionally only, but on 
the general scale, the heathen may be saved with- 
out a knowledge of Christ. Not possibly only> 
which few would deny, but practically they have 
been saved in the ages past. By the grace of God, 
acting through imperfect beliefs and overruling 
destructive errors, or by the working of occult 
and mysterious decrees, the natural drift of error 
to a retributive destiny has been reversed. 

Not that all these vagaries of opinion have come 
to pass anew from recent theological speculations. 
But when an intense awakening of missionary 
ardor, founded on intense convictions of the lost 
state of mankind, has been rudely rebuked, the 
door is thrown wide open to the influx of any and 
every error tending to its extinction. Apostolic 



Studies in Theology. 61 

zeal is checked when apostolic beliefs are shaken. 
Even doubt is sufficient to paralyze the nerve of 
missionary enterprise. A question of their neces- 
sity strikes at the root of the motives which un- 
derlie them. 

18. The questions here raised are not merely 
questions of Biblical interpretation. They are 
also questions of historic fact. They are answer- 
able by the phenomena of real life. The actual 
condition of the unevangelized nations and races, 
as the Gospel finds them, may be appealed to for 
independent evidence. 

19. If the un-Christianized peoples, by the condi- 
tions of their birth and probationary discipline, 
or by virtue of some occult decree of God, are 
already in the time of redemption, that fact, it may 
be assumed, will disclose itself in certain very sig- 
nificant phenomena. Individual character should 
often speak it. Not exceptionally but with suffi- 
cient frequency to prove the presence of regener- 
ating forces widespread and rooted deep. Private 
virtues should give signs of thrift. Public morals 
should be healthy in their tone and robust in their 
grip upon social institutions. Such institutions as 
those of marriage and the family and the judiciary 
should give evidences of moral soundness. Popu- 
lar forms of worship should be such as to make 
for the interests of spiritual religion. Religion 
and morality should go hand in hand. 

20. In a word, the civilizations existing in 
heathen lands should indicate that society is 



62 My Note-Book. 

morally on an ascending grade. Indeed, religions 
which are preparative to Christianity should approx- 
imate its teachings in their regnant ideas. To a 
philosophic observer they should appear to be 
prophetic of its coming. They should be anticipa- 
tory of its ruling spirit, full of sublime and myste- 
rious hints of its revelations. They should breathe 
an atmosphere of Messianic promise. The civili- 
zations efflorescing from them should display the 
moral buoyancy of nascent and crescent, not the 
stagnation of effete and decadent races. 

21. Now the critical inquiry is, are these condi- 
tions true of heathen and Mohammedan races, as 
the Gospel finds them ? Do heathen and Moham- 
medan civilizations, before they are renovated by 
Christian ideas, give any such tokens that they are 
the work of nations and races which are rising in 
the scale of moral dignity? Do the facts of 
Oriental life prove that any uninspired religion, 
or secret redemptive working of the Holy Spirit is 
a preparative of Christianity in any such sense 
that it does or can imitate among the masses of 
mankind the work which Christianity promises to 
complete in the salvation of individuals and the 
regeneration of society? For example, are the 
conditions which seem to have existed in the men- 
tal history of Socrates and Plato and Marcus 
Aurelius reproduced on any large scale among 
heathen and Mohammedan thinkers ? How many 
such examples of mental and moral forecast of a 
revelation from Heaven does a vigilant missionary 



Studies in Theology. 63 

discover in a lifetime ? To make these inquiries 
is to answer them. 

22. Our time-tried theory of niissions is also 
imperilled by a denial of the finality of a proba- 
tionary discipline limited to the present life and 
administered under the light of nature alone. We 
have sent the Gospel to the heathen, believing that 
without it they can know the living and true God. 
We have accepted the teachings of St. Paul, that 
" eternal power and Godhead " are revealed in the 
phenomena of the material universe and the intui- 
tions of the human conscience. These sources of 
religious knowledge constitute the groundwork of 
a just and benevolent probation. If in the working 
of it men are not saved, they " are without excuse." 
Such a probation is a " fair trial." It is sufficient 
to sustain in eternal justice a system of rewards 
and punishments. A knowledge of Christ, therefore, 
is no maris moral right. It is a gift of God to the 
undeserving. It is of grace, and of grace only. 
The perdition of men who leave this world in 
ignorance of a Redeemer and unforgiven, is not 
their misfortune ; it is the penalty of their sins. 
They came into the world subjects of an equitable 
probation ; they leave the world subjects of an 
equitable condemnation. 

23. Christian missions, therefore, are designed to 
save men not from a grim, implacable decree of 
God, but from the maturing of their own depravity. 
Our missionaries go to their rescue, not from their 
fate, but from their guilt. The emergency from 



64 My Note-Booh. 

which we seek their deliverance is a voluntary ruin 
from which deliverance is impracticable only in one 
world. We claim that probationary discipline under 
such conditions meets all the demands of the 
heathen conscience. It satisfies our profoundest 
reverence for the honor of God. On this theory 
of probation has been founded every Christian 
mission in the world. On this theory the Acts of the 
Apostles were executed and the Epistle of St. Paul 
to the Romans was written. We reasonably doubt 
whether, on any other hypothesis, such an enter- 
prise as a mission to unevangelized nations would 
ever have existed to the end of time. Again, 
we cannot know that it would ever have been 
commanded. 

24. This claim of the equity and the sufficiency 
of moral trial under the light of nature is now 
questioned. By some it is uncompromisingly de- 
nied. An improved " ethical instinct " is set up as 
a test by which that which seems to be the plain 
declaration of the Scriptures is to be tried and 
condemned. By the same standard of ethical taste 
the early propagation of Christianity is brought to 
trial. The verdict pronounced upon it is that it 
was the work of a darker age than ours. Apostles 
saw through a glass darkly. Saints had a less 
truthful insight than ours into the Mind of God. 

We are told that the restriction of any man's 
probation to one lifetime, and that illumined by the 
light of nature only, is unworthy of God. It is the 
outcome of an ascetic theology. It is a relic of a 



Studies in Theology. 65 

reign of terror over theological inquiry. An eter- 
nal destiny cannot be fairly determined by the issues 
of a moral trial thus impoverished in its conditions 
and limited in time. Men have a right to some- 
thing better. A just God will provide something 
more luminously expressive of His benevolence. 
If not in this world, then in another, men must be 
lifted to the level of a Christian probation. Other- 
wise they are hardly dealt with, and God is 
dishonored. Such is the belief of some, and the 
petted hypothesis of others. 

25. Some who do not claim this enrichment of 
probationary conditions on the ground of justice, 
claim it as the fruit of Divine benevolence. They 
declare that whatever may be theoretical equity in 
the allotments of probation, infinite benevolence 
imposes a law of its own. A natural as distinct 
from a Christian trial does not meet its demand. 
A probation worthy of God as He is represented in 
the " ethical judgments " of our advanced culture, 
must somehow and somewhere bestow on all men 
a knowledge of redemption. That conception of 
God which the work of redemption has created 
must be permitted to exert retroactive sway over 
the range of its operation. Every man, therefore, 
past, living, or to come, must have or have had in his 
own consciousness a Christian chance of heaven. 

26. Just here the new theology interpolates an 
error which carries with it immense and sinister 
consequences in the argument. Yet it is often so 
plausibly put that the fallacy passes without detec- 



66 My Note-Book. 

tion. A probation under the light of nature only 
is subjected to a pessimistic depreciation of its 
value. Its conditions are grossly underrated. 
Man's moral freedom is reduced to its minimum, 
by some to zero. Its sublime and awful preroga- 
tives are ignored. The sovereignty of conscience 
as God's vice-regent in the soul is overruled by 
laws of heredity. Inherited beliefs are exalted 
as supreme factors of destiny which lord it over 
the omnipotence of the human will. The result 
is that to the popular mind probation under the 
light of nature appears well-nigh hopeless. It is a 
trial the result of which is a foregone conclusion. 
Its magnificent opportunities are but chances. The 
chances are determined by loaded dice. The cer- 
tainty of moral catastrophe lapses into necessity. 
Man becomes in the end, not what he will, but 
what he must. His probation in this world is 
rather detective than restorative. He has been 
thrust without his consent into the arena of a lost 
conflict. Mankind in the mass are a foredoomed 
race. Their moral history may have strategic uses 
in the plans of God for the benefit of other races 
in the universe, but none whatever for their own. 
Practically, therefore, to every man's sense of jus- 
tice, the Christian chance of heaven ceases to be a 
favor; it is a right. Grace is no more grace. God 
cannot refuse it without dishonor. 

27. We cannot deny that this interfusion of 
benevolence with justice in the Divine purposes of 
redemption is plausible. More, it is fascinating. 



Studies in Theology. 67 

It appeals to some of the most seductive sensibili- 
ties of our nature. We confess the attractiveness 
of the novel word which has been coined to ex- 
press it. When men tell us of the discovery of a 
Christocentric law of salvation, we bow in acknowl- 
edgment of the adroitness of the epithet. But if 
it be expressive of an advanced insight into the 
nature of the Divine government, its bearing on 
the theory of missions to the heathen is inevitable 
and revolutionary. If prosecuted at all, they must 
shift their ground of necessity and of motive. 
They must be supplemented also by the promise of 
a future probation for all whom they fail to reach 
in the present world. 

28. This is a convulsive change in the mission- 
ary policy, of the Church. We should take no 
such leap in the dark. We do well to test it by 
a plain, practical appeal to the facts of heathen 
experience. In other words, we should ask for the 
verdict of the common sense of the heathen mind. 
Especially is there one line of unwritten history 
which we may study with no doubtful success. 
That is, the testimony of the human conscience 
and common sense when these emerge from 
heathen or Mohammedan beliefs into Christian 
discoveries and convictions. What is that testi- 
mony? 

29. What, for example, do heathen converts to 
Christianity affirm of the character of their ante- 
Christian history ? Do they, or do they not, hold 
themselves guilty for their rejection of the true 



68 My Note-Booh. 

God ? Do they, or do they not, repent of idolatry 
as a sin ? What of their licentious and inhuman 
rites of pagan worship? Do they acknowledge 
these to have been outrages upon right reason and 
good conscience ? Do they confess infanticide as 
a crime ? Do they hold themselves justly punish- 
able for these things under the righteous govern- 
ment of God ? Does the heathen conscience, when 
brought to face the facts under the illumination 
of Christian ideas, act the part of a detective, 
a remonstrant, and a punitive authority in the 
heathen soul ? 

30. What, again, have Mohammedan converts to 
say of the falsehood, the impurity, and the cruelty 
which are said to be almost universal in the habits 
of their race ? We are told that, in some parts of 
the East, the courts of English law can scarcely be 
conducted, because of the obtuseness of the natives 
to the sanctity of an oath. Warren Hastings, 
when impeached for high treason in his adminis- 
tration of the government of India, was acquitted 
chiefly on the ground that, as Lord Macaulay 
observes, "the oath of a Hindoo could not be 
trusted." Elsewhere he says : " What the horns 
ar£ to the buffalo, what the paw is to the tiger, 
what the sting is to the bee . . . deceit is to the 
Bengalee. Elaborate tissues of circumstantial 
falsehood, chicanery, perjury, forgery, are the 
weapons offensive and defensive of the people of 
the lower Ganges." Mohammedanism is little 
better in its standards of morality. Islam has 



Studies in Theology. 69 

become the synonym of brutality in the service 
of religion. 

31. Repeat the crucial inquiry : how do converts 
to Christianity from these races judge of their old 
religions and moralities? Do they call themselves 
unlucky or guilty ? Do they turn to Christ as sin- 
ners or as victims of the laws of heredity ? Are 
their vices " kismet" or are they crimes ? Do they 
ask for pardon, or do they claim in justice the 
" Christian chance " ? In a word, does the ante- 
Christian history of Oriental converts, as it lies in 
their startled memory, appear to themselves to have 
been a moral trial for the abuse of which they are 
responsible, and justly exposed to the wrath of God ? 
That self -judgment, whatever it may be, is the ver- 
dict of the silent and invisible government of God 
which every man carries with him in the vice-re- 
gency of conscience. What is the verdict ? Again, 
to ask the question is to answer it. 

32. In defence of an exotic theology it is often 
urged that the novel theory is held in theory only. 
It will not be obtruded in the pulpit at home. 
The missionary who has been captured by it will 
carry it in his pocket. He will not attempt to 
indoctrinate with it infant churches on heathen 
ground. He will hold it only in philosophical 
reserve. 

It is to be regretted that this plea has been urged 
for the novel theology or for any theology. If it 
means anything, it means that theological beliefs 
shall be held in secret. But a secret theology sug- 



70 My Note-Booh. 

gests by the very epithet an offensive odor. We 
do not know what corruption it may grow to in 
the lapse of time. It has a Jesuitical look. The 
world's experience of such a policy in matters of 
religion is uncanny. If anything can bear light, it 
is a religious thought. That does not naturally 
take to hiding. The very consciousness of con- 
cealed beliefs imperils the mental integrity of a 
godly man. It tempts to a tortuous diplomacy a 
wily man. Christianity finds no place for the dis- 
tinction between exoteric and esoteric doctrines. 

33. But beyond this, a latent theology is impos- 
sible for any great length of time to an earnest 
man. This is emphatically true of a secret belief 
on such subjects as those reconstructed by the new 
theology. They are among the most transcend- 
ingly solemn themes of human thought. Men who 
believe anything respecting them believe intensely. 
No man given to earnest thinking can keep long 
in reserve opinions so profoundly related to human 
destiny. They will out, more surely than murder 
will. They incessantly struggle to the birth. 
Bold men will not long submit to keep them 
under diplomatic cover. Will honest men ? Diplo- 
matic preachers will disclose them unconsciously. 
Through crevices of the most adroit discourse they 
will find their way. The discussion of cognate 
themes will let them loose in hints and implica- 
tions and refractions. 

34. A preacher may be ever so reticent about 
occult beliefs in his sermons, yet his prayers, if he 



Studies in Theology. 71 

is an earnest believer, will scatter them broadcast. 
The more devout the man, the more vividly will 
his prayers tell the story of his secret faith. Never 
yet did a latent belief long remain in hiding in the 
mind of an intensely praying man. That which is 
really in him must fly out, as through wide-open 
windows, on the wings of his devotions. Sooner 
or later, though whispered in the closet, it will be 
shouted on the house-top. Some men, in indig- 
nant revolt from their self-imposed taciturnity, 
will break open their padlocked lips, and blurt out 
all they think and a good deal more than they 
know. 

No, no, this will never do. We betray a shallow 
knowledge of men when we consecrate as a pastor 
or a missionary a candidate who believes error, or 
who does not know what he does believe, founding 
our action on the hope that he will never tell of it. 
He cannot help telling of it. 

35. There is something phenomenal in the recep- 
tion which its opponents have given to the Calvin- 
istic type of theology. Not in its extremes and 
its eccentricities alone, but in its moderate and 
balanced forms, men have heaped upon it abuse 
and obloquy. No other modern confession of faith 
has been debated with such virulent and venomous 
dissent. It is one of the rarest achievements of 
theological candor, if its opponent gives a state- 
ment of it which its believer can accept as his own. 
Philosophic thinkers lose their balance in assault- 
ing it. Good men fall from grace in disproving 



72 My Note-Book. 

it. The more " liberal " unbelievers are, the more 
intolerant is their reasoning and the more vitriolic 
is their animosity. This is emphatically true of 
that class of men of letters in whose culture liter- 
ature takes precedence of religion. 

36. One of the pet ideas of Mr. Emerson is 
"the malignant mythology of Calvinism." Such 
is his modest caricature of a system of beliefs 
which has for centuries commanded the faith of a 
larger proportion of the cultivated mind of Chris- 
tendom than any rival. It has been the favorite 
belief of the more thoughtful confessors of Chris- 
tianity from the beginning. Men of independent 
inquiry, of well poised minds, and of profound 
religious nature, have inclined to one or another 
form of it in larger numbers than those commanded 
by any other theological structure. The literature 
of the last three hundred years contains more of 
elaborate discussions in its defence than is to be 
found in that of all other compends of Christian 
doctrine combined. In substance it is the spinal 
cord of the most illustrious of historic creeds. It 
is the soul of many of the most precious products 
of Christian hymnology. Men have argued it and 
sung it with equal force of conviction. Sangui- 
nary battles have been fought for it, as the most 
potent ally of civil and religious liberty. Histo- 
rians of the latest and most brilliant type of civil- 
ization laud it as a tributary to all that is most 
valuable in civilized society. Yet in the face of 
all this, we are called upon to believe that Calvin- 



Studies in Theology. 73 

ism, in any form of it, is a mythology ! The old 
Greek cultas is treated by many literary men with 
more decent respect. 

37. The Calvinistic way of thinking in theology 
has commanded the loyalty of Christian woman- 
hood, in its most refined and cultivated represent- 
atives, and these in larger numbers than can be 
claimed for any other symbol of religious faith 
now extant. Devout woman has trusted it, loved 
it, sung it, suffered and died for it, in multitudes 
incalculable. Yet despite all this, grave and 
learned and reverend critics would have us believe 
that it is a " malignant mythology " ! 

38. There is a theology of the rainbow. As a 
pledge of the veracity of God in the promise to the 
patriarch on his egress from the Ark on Ararat, the 
bolt of lightning which had a little while before 
reddened the heavens in anger, might have been 
selected and consecrated instead of the bow of many 
colors in the clouds. Either must have received 
its significance in part from the potency of a Divine 
decree. But what else than the variegated coloring 
and the protective arch — the symbol of strength 
and safety to all ages — and the sublime reach 
from horizon to horizon, as pictured by the rain- 
bow, could have symbolized the moral beauty of an 
immortal covenant of God with the awestruck and 
trembling remnant of a depopulated world ? 

39. Creeds, designed to be denominational stand- 
ards of faith, must from the nature of the case be 
compromises. It is not singular if, to believers of 



74 My Note-Book. 

an after-age, they appear inconsistent and illogical. 
The conflicting parties who framed them were each 
intent on the statement of their own belief, not 
caring much for the welding of it to that of 
dissenters. So long as each found its own there, 
both and all were content. That is often true of 
confessions thus framed, which Lord Macaulay 
affirms of political constitutions — that " some of 
the most useful political instruments in the world 
are among the most illogical ever penned." The 
phenomenon, in religious and civil history alike, is 
one of the inevitable necessities of compromise 
among independent thinkers. Such representative 
documents need to be interpreted in the light of 
their origin. They signify what they were meant 
to signify. Rankest heresy in the letter may be 
strictest orthodoxy in historical intent. 

40. Subscription to ancient creeds, or indeed to 
any creeds which are emphasized by the conditions 
of their origin, involves a point of law and a point 
of honor. In law the silence of a creed may limit 
the responsibility of a subscriber. He may believe 
anything or nothing on a theme on which the 
instrument affirms and implies nothing. Not so in 
the point of honor. The history of a creed may 
carey declarations more explicit and more authorita- 
tive than words. Its originators may have expressed 
by silence a faith too positive to need utterance in 
syllables. Their reticence may have been evidence 
that a truth is self-evident. They saw no need of 
speech. Must a creed framed for an evangelical 



Studies in Theology. 75 

church on Cape Cod contain an article denying 
the Divine origin of the Mormon Bible ? 

41. Many who do not hold extreme or extensive 
religious errors, often give aid and comfort to those 
who do. Error in some things pays tribute to 
error in all. An ancient faith consolidated in 
the popular thinking cannot be shattered at one 
point without opening breaches for assault at every 
point. The premises which lead to one false doctrine 
support cognate doctrines underground. Scarcely a 
contradiction of revealed theology exists to which 
a false theory of Biblical inspiration may not logi- 
cally lead. 

42. New departures in theology are always fas- 
cinating. Opposition is attended with more or less 
of obloquy. " Orthodoxy," as the world goes, is 
commonly a term of reproach. Novelties in relig- 
ious thinking have the look of emancipation 
from ancient bondages. It is easy to talk on the 
side of liberty in anything. It is sure to bring 
down applause from the galleries. 

43. The most inexplicable feature of the Divine 
.plan for the redemption of this world is that its 
execution seems to involve an appalling waste of 
being. Of all the antediluvian generations, only 
one group of eight souls was deemed fit to lift the 
Divine decree, and project it across the awful 
chasm of the Noachian deluge. All the rest of 
that unknown population was apparently wasted 
mind. Our sacred books make the impression 
that, so far as the redemptive history is concerned, 



76 My Note-Book. 

they were flung aside as unfit material for a work 
so august and so holy. God repented that He had 
created them. The deluge bears every sign of a 
retributive infliction. 

44. From the deluge to the call of Abraham 
the scroll of the centuries is rolled up in silence. 
The " selection of the fittest " is narrowed down 
to one stock of mind. The other teeming multi- 
tudes of being are left out of the executive line 
of God's purpose in redemption. From Abraham 
to Christ thousands of years are given to the moral 
training of one diminutive and obscure people 
for the welcome of the Redeemer and His late 
coming. 

Again, the great nations are left out of the suc- 
cession of redemptive decrees. Their magnificent 
civilizations are a moral desert. Whatever may 
have been their mission laterally to the plan of 
redemption, to its direct evolution they pay no 
tribute. They give birth to neither prophets nor 
apostles nor Messiahs. The idea of a church is 
not found in their splendid literatures. Their 
vocabularies — the supreme creations of human 
speech — contain no words adequate to express 
certain thoughts of the Divine Mind in the recov- 
ery of mankind. The inventive eloquence of St. 
Paul at Mars Hill could discover nothing in the 
masterpieces of Grecian sculpture which as such 
he could make auxiliary to his aims as a Christian 
preacher. He saw no occasion to do homage to 
Phidias and Praxiteles as in any sense his own 



Studies in Theology. 77 

forerunners. Even the colloquies of Plato have 
lain undisturbed in the silence of centuries. No 
apostolic inspiration recovered them from the obliv- 
ion of ages. As related to the work of redemp- 
tion, in the grand history of its evolution, the 
great nations and races of antiquity lie like drift- 
wood in the troughs of the sea. 

45. Theological science can never outlive its 
obligations to the English Puritans. As a body, 
at the time of their supremacy in English politics, 
they contained a larger proportion of learned and 
godly men than any other of equal numbers in 
Europe. They made the taste of the age theolog- 
ical. Divinity became a study in which men and 
women of culture were ambitious to excel. Men 
lost prestige if they were ignorant of the great 
schools of theological opinion. At the Bar it was 
a collateral branch of Law. Judges and chancel- 
lors wrote theological monographs. Never before 
nor since the age of the Puritan ascendency in 
England has the popular mind, even any consider- 
able fragment of it, been so ponderously weighed 
with theological ideas. 

46. In Cromwell's armies, sergeants debated the 
doctrine of decrees. A painting is extant in Edin- 
borough, commemorating the exposition of a 
chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, by a cor- 
poral in his tent before the battle of Naseby. 
The chief reason, probably, of the good order of 
Cromwell's soldiery, when they were disbanded, 
was that their minds were laden with great relig- 



78 My Note-Book. 

ious thoughts. They had no taste for the frivol- 
ities of this world while their life was absorbed in 
visions of another. Theologic beliefs conceived 
amidst the throes of revolution received also an 
intensity which in the line of Puritan descent 
they have never lost. 



IV. 

. THE PERSONALITY OF A PREACHER. 

1. One element exists in all .powerful preaching, 
to which criticism has given no name. Hearers 
describe it, but do not define it. They say : " We do 
not know what it is, but it is something individual 
and peculiar to the man." Jeffrey, the editor of 
the Edinburgh Review, said thus, on his first hear- 
ing of Dr. Chalmers : " I do not know what it 
is, but there is something altogether remarkable 
about that man.'' Singularly, this subtle quality 
has found expression in other languages in corre- 
sponding words. French audiences have so often 
thus described it that French critics have appro- 
priated their description as a lame attempt at 
definition. They call it the "je ne sais quoi." 

2. Preaching may have every other quality of 
powerful discourse, and yet fall short of superla- 
tive energy, for the want of this indefinable " je ne 
sais quoi." Without this occult inspiration, a ser- 
mon which is thoughtful, logical, ornate, practical, 
and not perceptibly deficient in spirituality, may 
achieve no more than to elicit some one of the 
commonplace criticisms by which hearers express 
the fact that they are pleased, but not swayed. 

79 



80 My Note-Book. 

They say : " A good sermon that for a fine morn- 
ing ! What is the news ? " 

3. Men who are profoundly impressed by preach- 
ing do not ask for the news, nor comment on the 
weather. The most significant token of the spirit- 
ual power of a sermon in the mood of a retiring 
audience is — silence. Radical change of char- 
acter or conduct is rarely produced by the fault- 
less discourse here described, unless the hearer, by 
the spring of his own receptive and responsive 
sensibility, puts into it an electric force of his 
own, which thrills him again by a rebound. Such 
preaching is heard from cultivated pulpits in times 
when society prattles of itself and about itself, and 
does not touch bottom in its convictions about any- 
thing. At such times, like people, like priest ! 

4. Other things being equal, a pastor's success 
will be proportioned to the incisive tact with which 
he probes the secret life of his hearers. So far as 
they become to him what they are to their own 
live consciences, his voice will have the authority 
of a live conscience. 

Sir James Mackintosh once said of William 
Wilberf orce : " I never knew another man who 
touched real life at so many points. This is the 
more remarkable in a man who is supposed to live 
in the contemplation of a future state." It was 
this blending of insight with foresight which made 
Wilberforce in his prime the authoritative con- 
science of the House of Commons. In questions 
affecting public morals, he was recognized as a 



The Personality of a Preacher. 81 

public censor whose judgment it was not safe to 
dissent from or to ignore. He represented the 
ideal of a successful preacher — a man who has 
such an insight into life here, and such a foresight 
of the life beyond, that he can use both as allied 
forces in the ministrations of the pulpit. 

5. The Divine blessing upon a pastor's work is 
bestowed under a law of benign and magnanimous 
condescension. It elects and consecrates the lines 
of usefulness intimated by his mental structure. 
The hand which made him lays down the grooves 
of his life's work. Often it adjusts circumstances 
and events to his infirmities. Even sins of which 
he is not remorsefully conscious do not thwart its 
benignant decrees. If through innate deficit or 
acquired disabilities, or even unconquerable dis- 
tastes, he cannot achieve one thing, he is consider- 
ately permitted to achieve another thing. 

6. To some men some clerical duties are signifi- 
cantly unconstitutional. The faculty for them is 
wanting. Or it exists in such infirm degree that 
the effort to master them is wasteful of time and 
mental force. Such duties are not required of 
such a man. Other things being equal, a man's 
best work in life is that which he can do best — 
that is, by the use of the best faculty that is in 
him. 

Divine providence is often condescendingly vig- 
ilant in its supervision of a pastor's search for his 
natural mission. It lifts him to his supreme possi- 
bilities of achievement. It inspires him with ideals 



82 My Note-Book. 

which are natural to his individuality. He is 
assisted to work in his own way. Grapes are 
not demanded of a fig-tree, nor figs of a juniper. 
Ante-natal prepossessions are often developed and 
used ingeniously for his advantage. Ancestral 
virtues reappear in him at critical junctures of his 
ministry. Ancestral prayers, venerable for their 
ages of repose in the Divine silence, are answered 
in his successes, or in failures which are successes 
in disguise. 

7. In a word, if a man is a docile child of God, 
the Divine economy takes him as he is, with his 
reserves of undeveloped faculty, and, by secret 
impulsions and opportune surroundings, and con- 
genial auxiliaries, makes the most of him and them. 
An eternal plan of benedictions ripens in his his- 
tory. To a large extent it is not his plan. Ample 
sections of it are made up of disappointments and 
incompletions and retrogressions. 

Emerson has somewhere said : " The way into 
life often opens backward." A wiser seer has 
said : " Thou shall hear a word behind thee saying, 
' This is the way.' "' A profoundly consecrated min- 
istry is packed full of these Divine condescensions. 
God never crowds a man to ascetic self-discipline 
in a work which he was never made for, and which, 
in God's system of strategic decrees, his life was 
never planned for. Conscience is awry in its judg- 
ments if, from a remorseful sense of duty, a man 
crowds himself into such a discipline. 

8. This law of Divine adjustments often gives to 



The Personality of a Preacher. 83 

a disappointed preacher his unexpected reward in 
the successes of other men. In every age the pul- 
pit has contained some men who have achieved 
brilliant usefulness by proxy. 

This was signally illustrated in the ministry of 
John Foster, the illustrious thinker, and not illus- 
trious preacher, of Bristol. Late in life he lamented 
that he did not know of one man, one woman, one 
child, who had been visibly led to a Christian life 
by the elaborate persuasions of his pulpit. Ap- 
parently he was not created for the pulpit. Had 
his stock of self-knowledge been more abundant, or 
more discriminate, he would never have entered it. 
He had neither the temperament, nor the beliefs, 
nor the ideals, of a suasive preacher. His tempera- 
ment was atrabilious ; his ideal of Christian living 
was ascetic ; his theology was fatalistic ; his deliv- 
ery was statuesque ; and his person, not magnetic. 
His congregation dwindled patiently to a fraction. 
His ministry was conspicuously an industrious and 
conscientious failure. He was one of the few sons 
of clergymen who misjudge and misuse themselves 
in choosing the profession of their fathers. I am 
unable to recall another really great and good man 
who has closed a life of ministerial service with 
such a disconsolate wail of disappointment. 

9. Yet John Foster was by no means God-for- 
saken. He was well known as one of the most 
suggestive thinkers of the century. His writings, 
though not voluminous, are a treasury of germinal 
ideas, which have been more prolific in their repro- 



84 My Note-Book. 

ductive fertility in other minds than in his own. 
His power of microscopic thinking was unrivalled. 
The ministry of nearly two generations have been 
indebted to him for materials of more stimulant 
thinking than the majority of them could originate, 
yet which they have adapted to popular assimila- 
tion more deftly than he could. The secluded 
thinker of Bristol, who could not hold his own 
congregation, has preached in metropolitan pulpits 
to charmed audiences through the lips of men of 
the magnetic order and of suasive faculty. Like 
Aaron the Levite, they " could speak well " ; but 
it was John Foster who roused and fructified their 
thinking power. 

10. Young preachers, on the threshold of their 
life's work, when oppressed by a sense of their 
intellectual insufficiency for it, may take heart, in a 
merely professional outlook on the future, from 
the fact that the world receives the early efforts 
of young men with marvellous leniency. The 
popular patience with juvenile crudities in the 
pulpit amazes an old campaigner who has become 
sublimely oblivious of his own. The pulpit, in 
this respect, is an anomaly. Young men are the 
favorites there, as they are not at the bar or in the 
medical profession.. A beardless face offsets an 
immensity of platitude. If a youthful preacher 
does not overrate himself, he may safely depend on 
a certain telescopic vision in his congregation to 
commit that folly for him. Seldom does it hap- 
pen that they cease to magnify his stature till it 



The Personality of a Preacher. 85 

has ceased to be important to him professionally 
whether they do so or not. Speaking in mundane 
phrase, he stands a fairer chance of being appreci- 
ated at his full worth than a young attorney or a 
young physician. They must prove their claim 
before they can assert it; he must disprove his 
before he can lose it. 

11. No man accomplishes work of superlative 
excellence in the ministry who does not revere 
his office as one of unparalleled personal dignity. 
11 Sometime minister of the Gospel " was the unpre- 
tending suffix which our clerical fathers used to 
append to their names in the title-pages of their 
publications. They knew no nobler insignia of 
rank. There was a worthy pride in their humility. 
They were dignitaries of a kingdom to which this 
world contained no equal. Princes of the blood 
royal, as a class, were their inferiors. Their self- 
respect bordered on reverence. The world of 
to-day smiles at their lofty mien, but the world 
which knew them best bowed its uncovered head 
when they walked the streets, and reverently stood 
up when they came down the pulpit stairs. There 
was no sham beneath the old band and surplice. 
This profound consciousness of their life's work as 
a calling, a high calling, a calling of God, a calling 
which lifted them into sacred alliance with Jesus 
Christ, was one of the elements of that power of 
control which made them leaders of great men and 
builders of sovereign states. 

12. One peerage in Great Britain is said to give 



86 My Note-Book. 

to its incumbent the prerogative of standing with 
covered head in the presence of his sovereign. 
That earldom is an emblem of a preacher's office. 
A preacher must believe this, or his life will be 
spent beneath his calling. As a man he must be 
such a man that he can revere himself for being 
elected of God to the preaching of Christ. 

13. An uplifting of a preacher from a lower to 
a higher plane of religious life is sure to declare 
itself in a re-enforcement of spiritual power. The 
vital force in the preacher becomes a vitalizing 
force to the hearer. In great awakenings the 
Holy Spirit makes use of the character of a pastor 
very much as He does of the character of the 
psalmist and the prophet and the apostle in the 
construction of the Scriptures. In both the per- 
sonality of the man is a factor in the weight, and 
especially in the aim, of his message. The truth 
that is in him is the word which comes from him. 
His own experience of it as a living thing gives 
to it a momentum which carries it straight to the 
mark. Witness Mr. Chalmers in the rural homes 
and byways of Kilmany, and Dr. Chalmers in the 
" closes " of Edinburgh. Robert Hall tell us that, 
in the early years of his ministry, he " preached 
Johnson." When he became a new man, he 
preached Christ. Then the Christian world found 
him out. 

14. When personal holiness in a preacher rises 
to pre-eminence, it is apt to declare itself in an 
expectant faith. He is apt to look for grand and 



The Personality of a Preacher. 87 

speedy advances of Christ's kingdom. In great 
revivals and reformations it is no uncommon thing 
for those who have felt in their own souls spiritual 
premonitions of their coming, and who have wel- 
comed them with unintermittent sympathy, to 
expect a rapid conversion of the world. In some 
minds this foreseeing faith takes the form of an 
anticipation of the speedy coming of our Lord in 
person. Read prophecy as we may, we cannot but 
own how tenacious is the hold of this idea upon 
the faith of the Church in the periods of her intens- 
est life and her most rapid growth. 

15. Often the expectation of the near advent of 
Christ is not so much an opinion as a development 
of character. It does not spring from a reckoning 
of prophetic symbols, and the collocation of events 
in historic crises, but from an identity of the be- 
liever's personal aspirations with Divine methods 
of achievement. Nearness to God awakens pro- 
founder sympathy with God. Thence come antici- 
patory visions of advances which shall be like God 
in the majestic sweep of their movement. 

16. It is as if the man were lifted up into 
supramundane regions of space, where supernatu- 
ral forces are in free play around him. His faith 
in the future takes on a recognition of those forces 
as being in the common way of God's working. 
To men like-minded they afford a prevision of con- 
quests vast and swift. Changes which have the 
moral impressiveness of miracles seem to him to 
be in keeping with Divine procedures. They are 



88 My Note-Book. 

no longer exceptional. They are a revelation of 
occult decrees. Convulsions of nature are their 
most significant emblems. That the mountains 
and the seas should change places, appears, to 
such an expectant trust, a very natural phenom- 
enon, as symbolizing the advancement of a spiritual 
kingdom. 

17. Early failure in the ministry is not neces- 
sarily, not even probably, prophetic of a life's work. 
In the pulpit, as in the secular professions, there 
are some late men. They develop slowly, and 
reach their maturity after middle life. The growth 
of the clerical tastes is sometimes like the opening 
of a dilatory spring. 

18. I have observed among students of theology 
a conspicuous difference between those born of 
clerical or diaconal stock, and those who had more 
secular antecedents. In the former, clerical apti- 
tudes often seemed to run in the blood. Ante-natal 
tendencies brought them early into a restful sym- 
pathy with their life's work. In others, these aux- 
iliary aptitudes and sympathies were often the 
result of prolonged and tough self-discipline. 
Some young preachers have themselves to make, 
as laboriously as they construct their sermons. 
One of the most eminent pastors of the Presby- 
terian Church once lamented at the age of sixty 
years that he was not yet enfranchised from the 
bondage of sceptical ideas which had oppressed his 
youth. Yet some of the most useful preachers in 
the end belong to this class of late-maturing minds. 



The Personality of a Preacher. 89 

They do not know themselves, and the world does 
not find them out, till they have passed their life's 
meridian. 

19. A prime virtue in the pulpit is mental integ- 
rity. The absence of it is a subtle source of moral 
impotence. It concerns other things than the 
blunt antipodes represented by a truth and a lie. 
Argument which does not satisfy a preacher's log- 
ical instinct ; illustration which does not commend 
itself to his aesthetic taste ; a perspective of doc- 
trine which is not true to the eye of his deepest 
insight; the use of borrowed materials which 
offend his sense of literary equity ; an emotive 
intensity which exaggerates his conscious sensi- 
bility ; an impetuosity of delivery which overworks 
his thought ; gestures and looks put on for scenic 
effect ; an eccentric elocution, which no human 
nature ever fashioned ; even a shrug of the shoul- 
der, thought of and planned for beforehand, — these 
are causes of enervation in sermons which may be 
otherwise well framed and sound in stock. They 
sap a preacher's personality and neutralize his 
magnetism. They are not true, and he knows it. 
Hearers may know nothing of them theoretically, 
yet may feel the full brunt of their negative force, 
practically. 

20. Dr. Philip Doddridge was an example of a 
preacher who owed his power in the pulpit chiefly 
to the impression which his sermons made of the 
personal integrity of the man. He had neither 
graces nor forces of elocution. His voice was 



90 My Note-Book. 

unmelodious. A nervous affection destroyed the 
significance of such delivery as he had. His dis- 
courses were neither elegant nor profound. He 
often discoursed on a dead level. Not an undula- 
tion of genius broke up the wooden mechanism of 
his style. But these grave defects were so over- 
balanced by the evidences of uncompromising in- 
tegrity of intellect and heart, that his preaching 
"attracted and enchained all classes of hearers, 
from those who could not read the alphabet, up to 
the poet Akenside." Men went from his public 
services saying: "He speaks what is true to his 
own soul." 

21. The influence of the religion of a country 
upon its public men should be a subject of anxious 
vigilance to an educated ministry. Only an edu- 
cated clergy can largely represent that influence. 
So far as the pulpit expresses it, it is preponder- 
antly a moral rather than an intellectual force. 
The personality of the clergy is at the root of it. 
Their intellectual culture should be such as to 
command the respect of other cultivated men. But 
their personal character should be such as to com- 
mand reverence. The ministry should justify the 
title by which, for centuries, the world has honored 
them as an order in society. Men of culture in the 
secular professions may not believe that the clergy, 
as a class, are more able men than themselves. 
But it is possible to convince them that, as a class, 
the clergy are more reverend men. If they are not, 
the religion which they preach will not long hold 



The Personality of a Preacher. 91 

the faith of the educated classes to whom they 
minister. 

22. That quality of impressive discourse which, 
by importation from the French vocabulary, we 
call "unction" is not identical with the "je ne 
sais quoi " to which allusion has been made. It is 
not necessarily peculiar to the individual. It is 
rather a spiritual grace than an intellectual gift. 
It is thought so vivified by emotion as to reproduce 
emotion. In its finest developments it is a devo- 
tional impulse. Old truths impregnated by it take 
on the force and fire of original thinking by being 
lifted into the atmosphere of prayer. Hence has 
arisen in European pulpits the usage of interposing 
ejaculatory prayers into the delivery of sermons. 
French and German preachers often do this with- 
out awakening in hearers the sense of incongruity. 

23. Spiritual unction is often extinguished by a 
preacher's solicitude for the safety of his reputa- 
tion. Few things are more fatally suffocative to 
the breathing life of a sermon than this form of 
egotism. Reputation itself suffers as fatally as the 
sermon. The Scotch have a proverb: "Nurse 
your reputation and lose your reputation," — an- 
other form of the Biblical admonition: "Whoso- 
ever will save his life shall lose it." An invariable 
element in the supreme flights of eloquent speech 
which have thrilled great assemblies and changed 
the destiny of nations has been that which the 
French call abandon. No other arena invites a 
speaker to exercise it so powerfully as the pulpit. 



92 My Note-Book. 

The chief objection to a professional dress for the 
clergy is the hint which it gives that the clergy- 
man has, on the sly, been thinking of his person. 

24. A secret requisite to a pastor's success is 
to know what he can do with the best use of his 
faculty, and where is its constitutional limit. It 
is a capital gift, to be able to work within that 
limit contentedly, and without waste of mental 
force, in straining after that which to him is uncon- 
stitutional. It is a habit of mind and body which 
few men acquire without severe self-discipline and 
some disheartening failures. Contentment in the 
place and with the work which a man is made for, 
belongs to the first class of spiritual graces. Short 
pastorates are due as much to the mistaken self- 
judgments and the consequent discontent of pas- 
tors as to the fastidious tastes of churches. 

25. Ministerial faculty when it is not all a waste 
is often wasteful. It is extravagantly expended 
on the results which it achieves. The cost of 
religious achievement should be counted like that 
of all other human enterprises. The sensibilities 
of both preacher and hearer are often taxed inor- 
dinately. A physician, who is at the head of his 
profession as an expert in the treatment of nervous 
disease, once expressed the opinion that clergymen 
rarely break down in health from excessive labor. 
" Intellectual labor," said he, " never kills. It is 
overtax on the sensibilities that does the mischief. 
Who ever heard of a Professor of Mathematics 
dying of overwork? The Differential Calculus 



The Personality of a Preacher. 93 

never caused a worse evil than a headache." Re- 
sources would be doubled by accumulation, if 
economically husbanded by self-collection. 

26. The Divine estimate of the work of a con- 
secrated man in the pulpit is more lenient than 
his own. The law of unconscious graces governs 
God's judgment in this thing. He is a magnani- 
mous Judge. He discovers excellences not visible 
to their possessor. He is especially considerate 
of that inevitable conflict between the strain of 
intellect and the aspiration after spiritual cul- 
ture which often oppresses and tangles the early 
struggles of a preacher. He remembers the dust 
from which His hand has fashioned us. 

27. One of the marvels of God's condescension 
is that He accepts imperfect service so cordially. 
He has no mental reservations of contempt. He 
deigns to be pleased with any work that represents 
the best of a man's aspirations. In His scale of 
judgment, desire rather than achievement is the 
measure of success. Angels catch their idea of 
the Christian pulpit from the mirror of His gener- 
ous opinions. A grand surprise is in store for pas- 
tors whom the world never hears of. They will be 
gladdened at the last tribunal by the discovery that 
they are no longer cast down by the remembrance 
of their mundane service. Their works do follow 
them, and they are not ashamed. 

28. The spiritual experiences of pastors in the 
act of preaching are often suggestive of supernatu- 
ral guidance. The phenomenon of spontaneous 



94 My Note-Book. 

generation of thought in extemporaneous discourse 
is well known. In the pulpit it is often accom- 
panied with such an overpowering consciousness of 
mental illumination, that the preacher cannot rea- 
sonably accept it as due only to the ordinary laws 
of the oratorical instinct. A more philosophical 
account of it attributes it to superhuman sug- 
gestion. 

29. In periods of widespread religious awaken- 
ing the atmosphere is laden with sympathies and 
auxiliary tributes. Then the phenomenon above 
named sometimes becomes conspicuous. An inci- 
dent in the early ministry of President Finney 
illustrates this. On one occasion he had brought 
to the pulpit a thoroughly elaborated sermon. He 
knew of no reason why he should not deliver it. 
But for same occult reason he could not deliver it. 
An invisible hand seemed to thrust it away from 
him. Another discourse on a different text and 
theme came, to his mind unbidden. It was as if 
a secret voice commanded him, saying : " Not that, 
but this." At the last moment he yielded to the 
unseen monitor, and preached as he believed the 
Lord bade him. To the end of his ministry he be- 
lieved that on that occasion he preached under 
supernatural direction. 

30. Another biographical incident illustrates the 
same principle of Divine suggestion, in the expe- 
rience of a preacher whose predispositions and high 
culture and conservative temperament forbade the 
hypothesis of self-delusion. He was a man of thor- 



The Personality of a Preacher, 95 

ough intellectual discipline and extreme conserv- 
atism. In elocution he was one of the most 
phlegmatic preachers of his time. Emotional va- 
garies were alien to his temperament and his train- 
ing. He preached as if in private colloquy. His 
mental excitement was rarely such as to require a 
gesture. 

Yet on one occasion this calm man, and almost 
apathetic preacher, in the midst of a written dis- 
course, paused, grew pale, and, with tremulous 
voice, said in substance : " I do not know what it 
means, but I seem to be in the presence of an 
unseen and holy Power. Is it possible that Christ 
is here, in this house, and would speak to us ? Let 
us pray ! " The sermon, I think, had no other 
ending. The audience retired in awestricken si- 
lence. No spoken discourse could have added to 
the electric impression. 

31. Such experiences as the foregoing are of 
course possible delusions. A preacher who should 
often profess to be thus moved in the pulpit could 
not trust himself or be trusted by his hearers. It 
is not the law of the pulpit that the occult teach- 
ings of the Holy Spirit should make themselves 
thus consciously felt by the preacher. But to 
assume that they never do so would justify incre- 
dulity respecting everything that is idiosyncratic in 
the mental history of genius. The human mind 
is made for correspondence with the Mind of God. 
In the service of the pulpit, it is under the promise 
of Divine illumination. That such illumination 



96 My Note-Book, 

should occasionally disclose itself in the conscious- 
ness of the preacher is in keeping with all that we 
know of the laws of mind and the teachings of the 
Scriptures. No other interpretation of well-known 
phenomena in the history of the pulpit is either 
philosophical or probable. 

32. An educated minister is perilously exposed 
to conflict between his convictions and his tastes. 
Frederick Robertson once said of certain agitations 
in the Church of England : " My tastes are all one 
way ; my convictions are all the other way." Dr. 
Thomas Arnold said in substance the same thing. 
The dilemma is one which a cultured clergyman 
must often encounter between the agreeable and 
the true. Sometimes clerical sympathy with revi- 
vals of religion is balked by antipathy of taste 
to the excitement and methods of revivals. Cul- 
ture in the pulpit as elsewhere leans to conserv- 
ative quiet. It dreads the discomfort of radical 
upheavals. 

33. One source of spiritual effeminacy in the pul- 
pit is often found in a preacher's consciousness of 
secret antagonism to the divinely ordained drift 
of the age in which he lives. The pulpit is a place 
of torment to a mediaeval mind in a modern civil- 
ization. A preacher carrying the load of such a 
contradiction in the very elements of his person- 
ality, is like an ancient " man at arms " on the field 
of Gettysburg. If any work on earth demands 
integrity of soul, — that is, wholeness of mental and 
moral being, — it is that of a Christian preacher. 



The Personality of a Preacher. 97 

Of him above all other men it is true, that a house 
divided against itself cannot stand. 

34. Pastors encounter extreme difficulty in the 
cultivation of the meditative graces in a life of 
distracting toils. Those graces are a necessity to 
the best successes, yet professional toil appears to 
be prohibitory to their growth. There is but one 
remedy: to adopt as one's ideal of Christian liv- 
ing, a state of communion with God. Toils and 
graces interlock if they are sought in conscious 
alliance with Christ. Toil becomes repose and 
graces a spontaneous growth in that grand fellow- 
ship of kindred. 

35. The absorption of a minister's time and 
mental force in other avocations than those of his 
own profession is an immense drawback to clerical 
usefulness. There is a subtle distinction between 
a vocation and an avocation. Avocations are often 
a fatal draught upon the vitality of a vocation. The 
late Rev. President Nott of Union College did a 
valuable service doubtless to the economics of his 
time by the invention of an improved pattern of 
stoves. The Rev. Dr. Morse of Charlestown did 
a service more valuable to popular intelligence by 
the construction of a Geography for use in public 
schools. But to one looking back from this date, 
it appears that both these eminent preachers would 
have performed a superior life's work, if they had 
left such forms of service to their secular contem- 
poraries, and had concentrated their own exertions 
upon their spiritual vocation. 



98 My Note-Book. 

36. A man called of God to the preaching of 
the Gospel is rarely called to anything else. When 
our Lord summoned two of his disciples from their 
fishing-boats, they left their nets straightway and 
followed Him. They moved with eager prompt- 
ness. This was a symbol of the exclusiveness of a 
preacher's work. Nothing outside of it can aug- 
ment its dignity. Any expansion of its bulk by 
secular labors is a contraction of its weight. Rela- 
tively such labor is mental waste. 

37. It has been remarked elsewhere that clerical 
influence with the cultivated classes of society is 
largely reflexive. It rolls back over the heights 
of social culture by the force of its accumulations 
below. This is especially true of that class of 
cultivated minds whose culture is the product of 
wealth and of the leisure which wealth creates. 
This is a distinct class in our times, in their rela- 
tion to the influence of the pulpit. Mental quie- 
tude, often degenerating into mental indolence, 
shields them from direct religious appeals. They 
are more effectually reached by indirection. Often 
they are profoundly moved in sympathy with relig- 
ious awakenings among their inferiors. Indeed, 
seldom does a powerful reformation agitate the 
social deeps without reaching the social heights. 
Other things being equal, sheltered and anchored 
ease is most solidly impenetrable by the expostula- 
tions of the pulpit, except when it is thus broken 
up and dislocated by the heavings of awakened 
mind below. The power to reach protected classes 



The Personality of a Preacher. 99 

by indirection, therefore, is a factor in clerical use- 
fulness of large range in the society of our age. 

38. A young preacher may fail to measure 
appreciatively his own resources by not recognizing 
the existence in his mind of latent ideas. Much 
of a man's reading which he believes to have 
passed out of his memory is not in fact beyond his 
recall. It will come to him in fragments, when 
memory is quickened by sympathy with other facul- 
ties roused by the intense thinking of composition. 
The success of extemporaneous discourse is often 
due to re-collections of forgotten thought produced 
by the stimulus of a large assembly. A thousand 
eyes before him will often magnetize the whole 
being of a man. They will send his memory for- 
aging for material with the speed of telegrams. 

39. More than this is true. A well-educated 
mind holds within its reach ideas which have never 
shaped themselves in his consciousness. They are 
thinking germs lying near the surface and ready 
at the summons of necessity to spring into lan- 
guage. On their first appearance there, they seem 
to him to be discoveries. Yet somehow he recog- 
nizes them as old acquaintances. They are latent 
ideas, waiting for expression. Their utterance by 
another mind may be the thing which first lifts 
them up into the light of his consciousness. Then 
his wonder is that such old truths should be sound. 

Blaise Pascal was at one time forbidden to study 
Geometry. When the prohibition was removed he 
found that nearly all the elementary theorems of 



100 My Note-Booh. 

the science were familiar to him. He had elab- 
orated them for himself in his own untaught 
thinking. The same phenomenon is more signally 
developed in our acquisition of religious truth. 
We have latent conceptions and fixed beliefs, and 
a world of tributary thought in the form of intima- 
tions, which take a long time in coming to their ma- 
turity. But a well-trained mind is accumulating 
this occult material all the while. Let such a man 
keep a note-book in which he stores his unused 
ideas which are worth using, and he will soon dis- 
cover that they are more in number than he can 
use. He will learn that his intellectual possession 
and his conscious discovery seldom synchronize. 



THE MATERIALS OF SERMONS. 

1. Masterly preaching requires the habitual 
selection of great subjects. Other things being 
equal, great subjects insure solid thinking. Solid 
thinking prompts a sensible style, an athletic style, 
on some themes a magnificent style, and on all 
themes a natural style. The best class of topics 
inspire a preacher to put forth the most tonic think- 
ing that is in him. He cannot deliver an insipid 
discourse upon them unless he has rare talents for 
pettifogging. Even commonplace subjects will 
not be developed in commonplace discussions by 
a preacher who in the general strain of his dis- 
courses breathes that atmosphere of electric think- 
ing which is created by the habitual handling of 
solid themes. As a man thinks, so is he, in every 
sermon that comes from his lips. 

2. The pulpit often suffers loss of vital force by 
a disproportionate amount of preaching on infidelity 
and its adjunct subjects. This danger besets es- 
pecially preachers who have lived through a period 
of sceptical thinking in their own experience. 
The preaching of the Rev. Albert Barnes of Phil- 
adelphia was impaired in its perspective from this 

101 



102 My Note-Booh. 

cause. No other class of his hearers than those of 
sceptical bias were so faithfully instructed by his 
pulpit, yet no other class were so few in numbers 

3. Scepticism obtruded in sermons, though in 
the way of masterly discussion, creates a cold 
wave in the atmosphere. Popular unbelief need 
not concern the ministry very much in the pulpit. 
We need not preach with tempestuous fidelity 
either to it or at it or about it. A live pulpit, 
aglow with positive beliefs, may for the most part 
safely leave it to take care of itself. Under the 
adjustments of probation in a Christian age and 
country, infidelity cannot come to maturity — it 
can scarcely germinate vigorously without a pre- 
monitory refraction of conscience. That is an 
experience in which men drift away from the 
House of God. Men cease to be worshippers 
before they become infidels. An invasion of that, 
form of error, therefore, must be repelled by other 
means than the ministrations of the pulpit. 

4. The ministry of some men is a comparative 
failure by reason of excessive preaching on com- 
minatory and remonstrant topics. Among the 
causes of this we find an ascetic theology, pessi- 
mistic views of the future, a saturnine tempera- 
ment, and a disconsolate conscience. The effect 
of it is to make the Gospel a message of intem- 
perate intimidation. There is a great deal of 
faithful preaching which is not helpful preaching. 
Men do not go from the hearing of it with a more 
enlightened conscience or a more resolute will- 



The Materials of Sermons. 103 

power. One of the most faithful pastors now 
living has preached his congregation out of doors 
by his fatalistic theology and his despondent views 
of this world's future. This is not a Christian 
life's work. No other system of human thought 
equals Christianity in buoyancy. From our sacred 
books the first and the last that we know of it is a 
song of congratulatory angels. A man wrongs the 
only redemptive system of beliefs whose preaching 
weighs it down preponderantly with intimidations 
and maledictions. 

5. Is the philosophy of the atonement expedient 
material for discussion in the pulpit ? Certain 
facts weigh heavily in the negative. (1) The 
Scriptures do not discuss it. (2) Any theory of 
the atonement must from the nature of the case be 
fragmentary. (8) No one theory has ever com- 
manded the consensus of the Church. (4) In 
religious awakenings such discussions # are not 
craved by inquirers after the way of salvation. 
(5) The moral power of the doctrine is greater in 
the form of unfathomed mystery than in that of 
philosophical solution. Divested of its mystery, it 
is shorn of its dignity. 

6. Popular science in our day lays upon the 
pulpit the necessity of emphasizing the supernat- 
ural in its general average of impression. This is 
essential to a certain equilibrium in the popular 
thinking. Science throws supernatural phenomena 
into disrepute. Not only by atheistic and agnostic 
negations, but by familiarizing the popular mind 



104 My Note-Booh. 

with marvellous results and immeasurable forces, 
in which no hint of the supernatural projects itself 
into the thinking of the people. Science often 
treats the universe as phenomena which need no 
cause. The true balance of cause and effect must 
be preserved by the pulpit. This must be achieved 
mainly by proportion in the choice of themes. 
The patriarchal idea of a personal creative and 
directive force in all phenomena should be made 
vivid. That which Plato conjectured and which 
pantheism dreams, Christianity uncompromisingly 
affirms. The pulpit should keep it fresh and 
operative in the popular theology. 

7. The pre-eminence of the supernatural ele- 
ments in Christian preaching is enforced also by 
the drift of the popular mind to absurd and malign 
forms of it if a rational and benevolent faith in it 
is not fostered. The human mind will have faith 
in the supernatural in some form. If not in that 
benign form which Christianity represents, then 
in wildest vagaries of belief, ending in religions of 
cruelty and lust. Men everywhere crave converse 
with invisible powers. Supernatural histories they 
must have, if in no better form than that of the 
Arabian Nights. Childhood craves them in fairy 
stories. When the sterner demands of manhood 
express themselves, they cling to absurd myths 
and malign necromancies, if the beneficent narra- 
tives of the Gospel are rejected and its miracles 
expurgated. 

8. The ancient belief in witchcraft illustrates 



The Materials of Sermons. 105 

the tendency of mankind to a malignant faith 
in the unseen. Dr. Sprenger, in his " Life of 
Mahomet," estimates that nine millions of the hu- 
man race have suffered death for that delusion. 
Women chiefly, and even children of tender years, 
have been its victims. The longing of human 
nature for converse with supramundane intelli- 
gences is too intense to be content with sportive 
or conjectural faith in them. They put on demo- 
niacal shapes if the Christian revelation is rejected 
or its authority suspended. All history teaches 
that the world will have a demonology of some 
sort. Demons regnant and triumphant will throng 
the air if the Biblical doctrine of their subjection 
to the sovereignty of God is ignored. An agnos- 
tic apathy on the whole subject does not meet the 
case as it lies in the history of human beliefs. 
The human mind cannot rid itself of the matter 
in that way. It leaves a vacuum which must be 
filled ; if not by the Christian ideas, then by some- 
thing contrary and infinitely degrading. 

9. The spiritualistic delusion illustrates another 
form of the same craving for the supernatural, 
perverted through a suspense of faith in the teach- 
ings of the Bible. It is claimed that the spirit- 
ualistic mythology now boasts the adherence of 
twelve millions of believers. Many of these are 
apostate members of Christian churches. Would 
such an appalling outbreak of anti-Christian faith 
have been possible in Christianized nations, if the 
popular craving for the supernatural had been met 



106 My Note-Booh 

by forceful preaching of a rational, well-balanced 
faith in the historic supernaturalism of the Scrip- 
tures ? In determining the question how to preach 
a supernatural religion, we should study well the 
related question, What will the popular mind have 
in its place ? Something, it must and will have. 

10. Ought the existence of God to be a subject 
of argumentative discussion in the pulpit? The 
answer is suggested by a glance at the condition 
of the public mind when trained under a Christian 
civilization. Atheism never has been, is not, and 
never can be, a popular dogma. Robespierre said 
a profound truth in affirming that it was an aris- 
tocratic belief. The mass of men are born Theists. 
This proclivity is enforced by responsive affinities 
of conscience which give to theistic faith the in- 
sight of vision. This cast of mind is almost uni- 
versal among the common people of Christianized 
races. A disbelief in God is to the immense 
majority of such races an absurdity. Theistic be- 
lief runs in their blood. It carries the weight of 
the common sense. Atheistic revolutions appear 
to them either maniacal or demoniacal. Preach- 
ing, therefore, which treats Atheism as a respecta- 
ble form of error is to such minds supremely dull. 

11. It is marvellous what power that preaching 
which by the dignity of its subjects and the solid- 
ity of its discussions, manifests respect for its 
hearers, has to make them worthy of respect. A 
respectable pulpit creates for itself a respectable 
audience. Laing in his "Notes of a Traveller" 



The Materials of Sermons. 107 

observes the wide difference in thinking power on 
religious topics between the common people of 
England and those of Scotland. Those of Scot- 
land owe their superiority to the strength of their 
pulpits. There, as everywhere else, Calvinism in 
its stoutest emphasis has taken possession of the 
thinking commonalty. It has either found such 
material or created it. 

12. Sermons which derive their subjects from 
local and temporary exigencies are often under- 
rated. Elemental truths have usually found their 
way into human thought through such exigencies. 
Truths thus ejected into light, it may be through 
volcanic craters, are the most effective means of 
meeting the exigencies which discover them. Rev= 
elation itself has come to us very largely through 
the crisis of national and tribal and individual his- 
tories. 

13. Eloquence, in preaching as in all other 
forms of it, consists largely in the art of using 
occasions and events. Other things being equal, 
he who lives in his own times and has faith in their 
precedence of better times is the most powerful 
preacher. He is the soul of the occasion, the 
prophet of the event. He lives in them, and they 
in him. The thing he speaks seems to be the only 
thing he could have spoken. He is the oracle of 
the hour. Self-surrender to the truth which the 
times ask for is the pivot on which his discourse 
turns. Hence the French critics call an orator's 
mood abandon. Some one has said that all our arts 



108 My Note-Book. 

are happy hits. They are born out of a felicitous 
use of events and occasions, and crises and things 
and men all found ready to be used to a purpose. 
So is it with the triumphs of public discourse. 

14. Some of Edmund Burke's most original and 
profound philosophical reflections were scintilla- 
tions struck out from the collision of his mind, at 
white heat, with those of his opponents on the 
hustings. The most forceful and helpful preach- 
ing has commonly a similar origin. 

This is one element in the superior force of 
extemporaneous preaching often observed. The 
preacher's mind, free from the restrictions of man- 
uscript, and pricked by the extemporaneous neces- 
sity, — by the spur of the moment, as we say, — 
springs to the exigency. Real life, in this as in 
other things, creates its own supplies by the outcry 
of its own demands. 

15. The most successful preachers have been 
those who, in adjusting the materials of the pulpit, 
have cherished the most appreciative estimate of 
small and uncultivated audiences. A far-sighted 
preacher will not grudge his best sermons to his 
least numerous and least intelligent hearers. He 
will revere the truth he speaks more than those to 
whom he speaks it. This reverence for his work 
is a distinct source of power. 

16. The "Astronomical Discourses" of Dr. 
Chalmers, on which chiefly his fame as a preacher 
rests, were first prepared for his rural congregation 
at Kilmany. His hearers commonly numbered less 



The Materials of Sermons. 109 

than a hundred. He had no thought then of deliv- 
ering those sermons elsewhere. The success of 
such a preacher was foreordained. He was pre- 
destined to be the oracle of unseen thousands. It 
is a law of that Providence which directs the work 
of the pulpit, that hearers shall be found for the 
man who has the power and the aspiration to say 
to them that which is worth hearing. He shall not 
seek them ; they shall seek him. Such a man the 
world always finds. He cannot be hidden. 

17. Another incident illustrates the reverence 
for his work and for his hearers which Dr. Chal- 
mers retained to his life's end. When he became 
Professor of Philosophy at St. Andrews, he gath- 
ered and taught in his own dwelling a Bible class 
of the poor and neglected children of the neighbor- 
hood in which he lived. For that little handful 
of juvenile paupers he prepared himself with pen 
and paper as conscientiously as for his class of 
collegians in the University. After his decease 
manuscripts were found on file in his study, con- 
taining memoranda of questions and answers and 
illustrations used in those gatherings of his Bible 
class. Behold the lowliness and the greatness of 
a Christian preacher ! 

18. Are funeral sermons worth their cost ? It is 
an open question, with ponderous argument in the 
negative. A biographical discourse is a painting. 
Was ever a good painting executed of a live man, 
from that which we so significantly call his u re- 
mains " ? Artists tell us that a truthful likeness 



110 My Note-Book. 

after death is obtainable only of children. Death 
creates much of the same difficulty in painting 
character in words and in painting features which 
express character in colors. In listening to such a 
sermon, if it gratifies our feeling of respect or affec- 
tion for the departed, does it not also offend our 
sense of truthfulness by an impression of its unre- 
ality? Massillon's descriptive powers placed him 
at the head of the French pulpit as a preacher 
of obituary sermons. But French critics pronounce 
that class of his discourses the least valuable of 
his productions. 

19. A pastor may learn wisdom from a review 
of the texts and themes of his sermons during any 
preceding ten years of his ministry. Such a review 
will disclose the proportions of his preaching. If 
he has a favoritism for one class of topics, it will 
appear. One pastor in Connecticut discovered 
thus the fact that he had not in nearly twice ten 
years preached on the atoning sacrifice of Christ. 
A recent critic of the pulpit of London affirms that 
if one should go the round of the metropolitan 
churches through a single year, one would learn 
that much more than half of the texts and subjects 
of discourse are taken from the Old Testament. 
A single fact like that indicates defect in one or 
more of the most vital characteristics of Christian 
preaching. The ablest ministry are liable to 
unconscious distortions for the want of vigilant 
reviews of past labors. 

20. Who has ever listened to a sermon on the 



The Materials of Sermons. Ill 

despotism of an unenlightened conscience? Yet 
few inflictions of ignorance and infirmity are more 
disastrous to Christian character. 

The Rev. John Newton, the author of some of 
the most valuable hymns in the English language, 
was once, as is well known, a slave trader on the 
coast of Africa. After his conscience was awak- 
ened to a discovery of his exceptional depravity, he 
could, for a time, scarcely be persuaded to converse 
on other than religious subjects, lest he should 
incur the guilt of " idle words." From the extreme 
of moral stupor he vaulted over to the extreme of 
moral hysteria. From the conviction that nothing 
was sin his moral sense came to the conviction 
that everything was sin. 

21. Preaching in religious revivals should have 
a care to exalt in the minds of recent converts the 
dignity of Christian living. Youthful believers, 
under the stress of sympathetic excitement, easily 
fall into bondage to an ascetic conscience. Enthu- 
siasm misguided easily runs into fanaticism. From 
that a reaction is sure to come. After such ex- 
tremes the natural and healthy equipoise of moral 
sense is not easily regained. The sin of "back- 
sliding" is the normal sequence of temporary sub- 
jection to an astringent conscience. 

22. Young converts, in their first tremulous 
awakening to the solemnity of life, have sometimes 
resolved that they would never indulge in a laugh 
again. One such youthful devotee did not recover 
from that self-imposed servitude, till the study of 



112 My Note-Book. 

anatomy disclosed to him the fact that man has 
facial muscles which have no other use which 
he could discover than to facilitate smiles and 
laughter. His moral sense received a vast expan- 
sion when he once admitted the idea that, in the 
creation of man, God must have descended to the 
sense of humor. An infantile piety, and especially 
that which succeeds repentance of exceptional 
guilt, needs to be instructed in the dignity of our 
moral intuitions, and of the faculty which creates 
them. A good conscience never drivels. 

23. Revivals of religion do not always concern 
directly the conversion of men and the subsequent 
increase of the Church. Other subjects than those 
which are commonly the burden of " revival preach- 
ing" are often more needful. A resuscitation of 
a decadent doctrinal faith is sometimes the most 
urgent necessity of the Church. An increase of 
its numbers is not then desirable till the needed 
reform is achieved. The quality of the Church is 
a more essential factor in her final triumphs than 
her numbers. At another time a revival of fidel- 
ity to the Lord's Day may be the critical want of 
the period. An awakening to the sacredness of 
the religion of the family may be the pressing 
demand of the hour. For the want of it the chil- 
dren of Christian households may be abandoning 
the faith of their fathers. A reformation in the 
practice of the mercantile vices may be the ex- 
treme need of another period. Numerical growth 
of the Church may be held in reserve in the Divine 



The Materials of Sermons. 113 

plan awaiting an elevation of the Church in char- 
acter. The quantity of moral force in the body 
of believers depends less on numbers than on god- 
liness of spirit. " What ? " is a more vital query 
than "How many?" 

24. " Revival preaching " therefore is sometimes 
a failure because it is an anachronism. Untimely 
subjects are discussed through negligence of these 
correlative awakenings for the want of which the 
cause of Christ is suffering and the future of the 
Church is imperilled. But is not the conversion 
of souls always in order ? Yes : in order, but not 
always in time. It may be no more timely than 
the reaping of a wheat-field in midwinter. In 
spiritual as in material husbandry there is a suc- 
cession of seasons. The wisdom of the springtime 
is the folly of the autumn. 

25. The choice of materials for the pulpit 
should be regulated in part by the principle that 
the preaching of experiences should preponderate 
heavily over the preaching of beliefs. Fidelity to 
the preacher's own mental history should be the 
forerunner and the model of his fidelity to hearers. 
We know very little beyond that which we know 
by heart. 

26. The preaching of Wesley and Whitefield is 
monumental in history for the grandeur of its 
successes. Yet it was remarkable for the paucity 
of its ideas. A few central truths of the New 
Testament were the staple of Wesley's forty thou- 
sand sermons. But these were impregnated with 



114 My Note-Booh. 

the Christian personality of the man. They were 
full of what Whitefield called "soul-life." For 
that element of soul-life, the early Methodist pul- 
pit has had no superior since the apostolic age. 
Hence came its romantic conquests. 

27. Over against the foregoing principle, how- 
ever, stands another, — that topics above and 
beyond the personal life of the preacher are a 
necessity to a symmetrical ministry. They should 
not be underprized. The fact often attracts atten- 
tion in religious awakenings, that some men are 
grandly used by the Spirit of God in the pulpit, 
whose personal " soul-life " is sadly below the level 
of their exhortations. Revivalists often have a 
powerful magnetism which is not wholly the mag- 
netism of grace. The principle involved is the 
same with that which underlies the enrichment of 
Christian Hymnology by the lyric genius of men 
who do not profess to have a personal experience 
of the truths they sing. 

28. It is often remarked that one of the most 
useful resources of Biblical wisdom is the inspired 
record of the follies and sins of good men. A 
large portion of the value of the Old Testament 
to the uses of the pulpit is found in its fidelity to 
the experience of sin in the lives of penitent be- 
lievers. The most natural histories of recovered 
loyalty to God are found there. 

On the same principle an uninspired preacher 
may find revelations of the elemental principles of 
religious life in his own unwritten experiences of 



The Materials of Sermons. 115 

sin. His conscious failures in the interior life 
furnish an illuminated record of truth, often more 
valuable than his self-conquests, because more 
incisive in their forms. That which a preacher 
knows of disaster in self-conflict, he knows by 
heart. He can speak it with assurance of heav- 
enly prompting. 

29. A certain manual of devotion, which has 
found its way into many languages, has been criti- 
cised for its austere fidelity to the record of the 
infirmities of Christians in their habits of prayer. 
One unlettered but shrewd reader once said of it 
in substance : " The author of that book must 
have been at some time a very wicked man. How 
otherwise could he have known so much of the 
failures of praying men and women in their secret 
life?" The judgment probably had a foundation 
in facts. The writer had drawn from his own 
remembered history. Such fidelity to oneself, if 
disclosed with compassion for others of like bur- 
dened memory, may give to a preacher some of his 
most effective sermons. He speaks what he knows 
by heart. 

30. Some ministers preach disproportionately 
and unseasonably on the decline of spiritual re- 
ligion. The fact is often affirmed on insufficient 
evidence. It is a theme of very easy discourse. 
The subjects of religious philippics are always such. 
Yet if the fact be true, it is so appalling that it 
should never be assumed unproved. A decadent 
church is a fearful spectacle to angels. But the 



116 My Note-Book. 

phenomenon is never true universally. A "rem- 
nant " of the faithful always survives. And they 
are the hearers who will take home to their 
afflicted consciences the diatribes of the pulpit 
against backsliders. No other class of subjects 
needs to be handled with such delicate considera- 
tion for the "smoking flax" and the "bruised 
reeds." 

31. The proportion of remonstrant and trench- 
ant sermons should be restricted by their ten- 
dency to degenerate into cynical and vituperative 
discourse. The secret mental history of the origin 
of many such sermons, if it were known, would 
disclose the fact that the preacher is laying upon 
the consciences of other men, an ideal of Christian 
living to which his own does not even aspire. An 
awakening of the moral sense in a religious teacher 
often spends its force in objurgatory discourse to 
others. A religious diatribe is one of the con- 
tortions of a pricked conscience. An honest dis- 
covery of his own deficiencies will make a preacher 
wary in proportioning his remonstrant sermons. 
We should walk humbly before God in the mission 
of rebuke. 

32. The objections often urged against the dis- 
cussion of difficult topics and obscure texts are 
offset in part by one very striking fact in the 
mental diagnosis of the condition of an audience. 
It is that hearers who are not intelligent enough 
to comprehend the most intellectual preaching 
still receive benefit from it through the trans- 



The Materials of Sermons. 117 

fusion of ideas from the few who do compre- 
hend it. 

Mind, like the body, has imperceptible pores 
through which thought is absorbed from the think- 
ing of its superiors. The stolid two-thirds of an 
audience breathe the intellectual and moral atmos- 
phere created and heated by the alert one-third. 
They are specially receptive of the most necessary 
and intense ideas. An emotive response of the 
few to the force of such ideas strikes chords of 
vibrating sympathy in the souls of the many. A 
profound mental experience of such ideas — that 
which introduces them into " soul-life " — cannot be 
concealed by anybody from anybody. It struggles 
to the birth in silent expression, though it finds no 
words. 

33. Therefore, preaching above the average of 
existing culture is a less evil than preaching 
below it. The chief hindrance to the salvation 
of many is their indolent, intermittent, somnolent 
interest in the eternal verities. Mental lethargy 
is a vice. In matters of religion it is an insult 
and a repulse to the Holy Spirit. It swells the 
accumulation of guilt. It is part of a preacher's 
province to rebuke it by discoursing on some things 
" hard to be understood." 

34. Yet it must be conceded that to the popular 
mind a frequent cause of dulness in the pulpit 
is an excess of philosophical discussion. We are 
not wise in assuming that every truth needs to be 
proved, or accounted for, or elaborately adjusted 



118 My Note-Booh. 

to other truths. Truth assumed is often more 
potent for moral uses than truth adroitly manip- 
ulated. Some things cannot be accounted for ; 
they are not proper subjects of philosophical 
adjustment. Some are not worth accounting for ; 
they do not expand in the process. Some are 
minimized in dignity by being subjected to philo- 
sophical debate. 

35. Sir Isaac Newton believed that he could 
account for the omniscience and omnipresence of 
God. He regarded them as necessities of the 
Divine nature made so by the hypothesis that 
" space is the Divine sensorium." Does that con- 
jecture add anything to our conception of these 
attributes? Who knows definitely what it signi- 
fies ? To the average of popular intelligence does 
it signify anything which can be comprehended 
from oral address ? Grant it, and what follows ? 
It is dangerous to the force of the pulpit, to reason 
in a style which prompts blunt hearers to say: 
" Well, what of it?" 

36. A Congregational or Presbyterian pastor 
must make his pulpit a power by the vitality of its 
subjects and the density of its thinking, or he has 
no power. He has no auxiliary support from 
ritual observances o He has less than none from 
ecclesiastical authority. No other body of public 
speakers have so little prestige from adventitious 
sources as the Calvinistic clergy. The theology 
they preach is pre-eminently a thoughtful theology. 
It is packed with the themes of thoughtful ser- 



The Materials of Sermons. 119 

mons. It needs such sermons to express its ele- 
mentary strength. In the very natural course of 
things we make much of preaching in public wor- 
ship. That we must make worthy of respect by 
the best thinking power of a community. This 
the Calvinistic pulpit has done through all its 
history. 

37. The aim of the pulpit should be to provide 
for the moral necessities as distinct from the intel- 
lectual luxuries and even the religious refresh- 
ments of hearers. The literature of the pulpit 
contains a large cabinet of curiosities. Subjects, 
arguments, illustrations, applications, appeals, are 
found in it which are not now, if they ever were, 
relevant to the spiritual exigencies which preach- 
ing is designed to meet. ' Our Lord would sweep 
them all aside with a word : " What is that to 
thee ? " If a preacher's work does not rouse in 
men and provide for a sense of exigency which 
nothing but the Gospel can provide for, it runs to 
waste. Such a pulpit may be one of the orna- 
mental institutions of society ; but a moral power 
with men, in the sense of a power of control, it 
cannot be. 

38. No audience has patience with a condescend- 
ing pulpit, if they detect the condescension. The 
greater their need of it, the' more vigorously do 
they repel it, and the more promptly do they sus- 
pect the imposition. Even children do not like to 
be addressed in a style of thinking which is on a 
level with their years. In this, as in other things, 



120 My Note-Booh 

they aspire to be thought to be above their years. 
Walter Scott, speaking of juvenile literature, says : 
"It is a fatal blunder to write down to children." 
Churchly audiences possess in large degree the 
spirit of youthful aspiration. 

39. The pulpit suffers no hardship in the intel- 
lectual demands of the age upon it. This is an 
awakened world. Life creates life. Thought runs 
to thought. Originality springs to greet origi- 
nality. Alert readers clamor for quickened authors. 
Live hearers throng upon live speakers. The pul- 
pit in this respect comes under the common law of 
all thinking power in this age of thought. The 
Holy Ghost does not work miracles to give success 
to dulness. 

40. The popular laudations of simplicity in 
preaching should be accepted with large allow- 
ance for a change of time. The story of Tillotson 
and his servant-maid may pass as containing a half- 
truth. But from the present generation the arch- 
bishop could not obtain a second hearing. Espe- 
cially should the pulpit take cognizance of, and 
make much of, the advance which time has brought 
about in the general intensity of thinking and liv- 
ing. The still, unimpassioned thinking and inor- 
nate style of Addison, which we have been trained 
to admire as a model, will never do for many of 
the themes of the pulpit now. Indeed, for some 
of them, the solemn, the comminatory, the over- 
powering, and the magnificent themes, it never 
was a good model. 



The Materials of Sermons, 121 

41. A protracted ministry may derive from the 
congruity of its messages a certain force distinct 
from that of isolated truths. Belief gains strength 
from concinnity. So does the utterance of truth 
gain suasive force from the consent of one truth 
to another and of all to each. Ramohun Roy, the 
Hindoo philosopher, said that the most decisive 
evidence to his mind of the truth of Christianity 
was the proof of a congruous and compact design 
in the structure of the Bible. A long-continued 
ministry has a similar resource of convincing and 
suasive power. In a long pastorate alliances of 
truth with truth have time to consolidate them- 
selves. Silent accumulations of force have time to 
grow and to interlock. The implications of truth 
in such a ministry may in moral effect equal its 
assertions. The most profound and enduring of 
our convictions rest on such implications and alli- 
ances and correspondences. 

42. The Trinitarian pulpit is often criticised for 
its neglect of the moral virtues and their opposites 
in the selection of the subjects of sermons. The 
criticism has too much foundation. It is one of 
the disproportions by which the symmetry of our 
ministrations is impaired, that the duties and the 
sins of real life are often overgrown by that system 
of truth which we call the " Plan of Salvation.'' 
The title itself is unfortunate. There is a want 
of personality in it. The discussion of it needs to 
be intermingled with more frequent and specific 
preaching on the morals of common life. 



122 My Note-Book. 

It is notorious that the conversational usages of 
society are infected with a want of reverence for 
truth. Yet would not a plain, direct sermon on 
veracity be to many congregations a novelty ? It 
is well known that in the morals of trade, a dis- 
tinction has grown up between the oath of the 
Court-room and the oath of the Custom-house. 
Yet how many pastors in commercial cities often 
preach on honesty to the civil government ? Cole- 
ridge once gave a fine hint to the English clergy 
of his day. Said he, in substance : " If I were a 
preacher in the city of London, I would not preach 
on the sin of wreckage. But if I were a preacher 
in a coast-village where wreckers plied their vil- 
lanous calling, see if I would preach on anything 
else." 

43. It is a truism — we ought not to need it; 
but do we not need it? — that the province of the 
pulpit is to take men as they are, and to call them 
what they are ; if wreckers, then be it wreckers. 
George Fox thought that he had made a great dis- 
covery when he found a preacher who " spoke to 
his condition." Spiritual awakenings always start 
with that discovery. 

44. The preponderance of so-called " spiritual " 
subjects over so-called " practical" subjects is a 
very natural error in the preaching of educated 
pastors. They are men of libraries. They are as 
they ought to be, — speculative theologians. They 
enter their professions at the end of ten years of 
studious seclusion. To many of them, the " prac- 



The Materials of Sermons. 123 

tical " side of life is a sealed volume. Their themes 
of discourse are very naturally chosen from their 
themes of silent thought. The evil of the dispro- 
portion is more serious than is often supposed. 
They may preach nothing but purest truth, yet as 
a whole their ministry may make the impression of 
falsehood. Their silences are false while their 
speech is true. 

45. I once inquired of an intelligent layman 
in middle life what impression the preaching to 
which he had listened had made upon his practical 
life. He replied in substance: "None at all. I, 
have heard good sermons for twenty-five years. 
The sum of all that I have got from them is that 
salvation is not a matter of conduct, but of faith. 
My principles of practical living I have had to 
discover for myself. The pulpit has not helped 
me." The verdict was valuable as that of the 
common sense, because the man was not a cynical 
censor of the ministry. His inherited and acquired 
prepossessions were all favorable to Christian ideas 
of life. He made a public profession of religion a 
short time afterwards. The preaching to which 
he had listened had been rather above than below 
the average standard of ability and of earnest pur- 
pose. But it had been, as a whole, a defence of 
the Christian theory of doctrine. The Christian 
theory of life had been, not suppressed, but de- 
pressed by the dead weight of speculative beliefs. 

46. In adjusting the materials of sermons, it 
should be remembered that the pulpit is a product 



124 My Note-Book. 

of the New Testament. It had no existence in 
the patriarchal, the Mosaic, and the prophetic 
ages. It should live mainly on the soil and in the 
atmosphere which gave it birth. An antique mind 
is out of place in its service. A preacher should 
be a Christian as distinct from a Hebraist in his 
tastes. 

This suggests the chief error in proportion 
which has impaired the symmetry of the pulpit. 
It is that of subjecting the New to the Old Testa- 
ment in its ministrations. But for this distortion, 
what a magnificent expansion of power would have 
been imparted to the Puritan pulpit ! Grand as 
it was in its Mosaic intensity, it would have had 
the majesty of apostolic insight if it had accepted 
its mission as one of the creations of apostolic 
inspiration. As the world grows older, the pulpit 
draws nearer to the closing ages of time. It 
should be administered in sympathy with the 
intensity of ultimate ideas, and the rapidity of ulti- 
mate progress, and the grandeur of ultimate con- 
quests. A preacher should be a forward-looking 
and a far-seeing man. He should be more at home 
with St. Paul than with Moses. 

47. The longer a man serves in the pastoral 
office, the more exalted will be Jiis estimate of the 
Scriptures as a treasury of materials for sermons. 
One of the early discoveries of a young preacher 
is the affluence of our sacred books in the subjects 
of pulpit discourse. The early dearth of topics 
soon gives place to a throng, if a man is a cordial 



The Materials of Sermons. 125 

student of the Word of God. Not texts only, but 
examples of character, principles of truth, illustra- 
tions from life, lines of argument, models of ap- 
peal, the roots of which lie deep in human nature, 
abound in it beyond all possibility of enumeration. 
No sacred books of other religions exhibit this 
overflowing abundance of materials for popular 
impression. Therefore other religions have not 
depended largely on suasive discourse for their 
propagation. 

48. The intellectuality of sermons is subject 
to a principle which regulates all persuasive elo- 
quence in popular address. It is that the speaker 
should stand upon an intellectual level above that 
of the hearers. Yet not so far above as to destroy 
the sense of sympathy and reciprocity between 
them. Anything in subject or argument or style 
which creates a sense of distance is fatal. Dis- 
tance easily grows to alienation. 

Daniel Webster said that if an attorney were 
perched as high up in the air and as far off from 
the jury as a preacher was in the pulpit of the 
last generation, he would not gain a case in a 
lifetime. The architecture of sermons may repro- 
duce the effect of the ancient architecture of pul- 
pits. An eminent scholar has remarked, with the 
same idea in mind : " I am always anxious when I 
see a very learned man mounting the pulpit stairs." 
The ultimate object of preaching is not instruction, 
but suasion. That requires proximity of preacher 
to hearer in intellectual affinities. 



126 My Note-Book. 

49. The most intelligent hearers enjoy most 
heartily the simplest preaching. Those who 
clamor for stimulant discourse are they who 
really know least about good preaching when 
they hear it. The more ignorant hearers are, the 
more fuss they make respecting the want of intel- 
lectual gifts and acquisitions in their pastors. It 
is the commonplace mind which complains most 
unreasonably of commonplace preaching. An emi- 
nent Southern preacher once remarked that he 
never seemed so successful in impressing the mas- 
ters as when he addressed their slaves. 

50. The obligations of preacher and hearer re- 
specting the quality of sermons are reciprocal. 
If the hearer has a right to good preaching, the 
preacher has an equal right to good hearing. An 
audience should bring to the service brains, if 
they assert the right to receive brains. There is 
an appreciative and appropriating faculty in hear- 
ers which is the preacher's right if he has anything 
to give which deserves appropriation. The faculty 
is one by which they meet his thought half-way. 
They welcome it. They take it in with preposses- 
sion. Nothing short of eager hearing is good 
hearing. Without it, a discourse may< be inspired, 
and yet pass for humdrum. With it, hearers will 
find u sermons in stones." The ablest preacher 
living has a fruitless labor if he must provide an 
audience with thinking power, or what is often 
the same thing, with the thinking mood. They 
deserve the well-known rebuke of Dr. Johnson to 



The Materials of Sermons. 127 

an opponent whom he failed to convince. The 
fatal defect of hearers who are indifferent to 
eternal things is that they have no favorable pre- 
possessions, no eager cravings, and therefore no 
appropriating affinities. A preacher, if he moves 
them at all, must lift and carry them. 

51. Christianity in its periods of decadence 
is never more void of vital power than when its 
ministry struggles to sustain its prestige by preach- 
ing chiefly those truths which it contains in com- 
mon with the religion of nature. An advanced 
system of faith cannot live on those elements 
which historically are far in its rear. As well 
might adult thews and sinews thrive on the organs 
and nutriment of infancy. Pure Theism alone is 
more potent than with the adjuncts of the forms 
and symbols of Christianity from which the life 
has died out. Under such conditions men had 
better be philosophers than Christians. 

52. One of the Siamese twins died before the 
other. It has been reported that the survivor died 
of horror at his terrific brotherhood with corrup- 
tion. In such a fearful conjunction of the living 
with the dead is natural religion where bound by 
an abnormal vinculum to a defunct faith in Christ- 
ianity. Both are doomed to a process of dissolution 
which has already begun. Such was the state of 
things in the Church of England in the age pre- 
ceding the advent of Methodism. Such is the 
condition of the Unitarian faith to-day, because of 
its forlorn struggle to build a popular religion out 



128 My Note-Book. 

of the religion of nature, but in Christian forms 
from which the most intense of the Christian ideas 
have been expurgated. 

53. The denial of man's moral freedom inevi- 
tably contracts the range of the pulpit in its choice 
of materials. A large group of central and most 
vital subjects are involved in human liberty. 
Without that solvent they cannot long be held 
subject to practical use in the popular theology. 
Logical minds will not continue long to preach 
on topics which force the servitude of the human 
will to the front. Masterly preachers will not 
preach under such conditions. They will not sow 
seed on a marble quarry. 

54. At the decease of an eminent preacher of 
the eighteenth century in the city of New York, 
an examination of his manuscript sermons revealed 
the fact* that he had seldom preached to uncon- 
verted men. To the communicants in the Church 
he had preached well. On his fidelity to them 
his fame as a preacher rested. The unregenerate 
portion of his hearers were virtually without the 
Gospel. He had not warned them to repent, for 
he did not believe that they could repent. He had 
not urged them to accept the Christian offer of 
salvation, for he did not believe that Christ died 
for them. What a fearful hiatus existed in respect 
to the symmetry of that metropolitan ministry ! 

55. Ages of great indifference to the ministra- 
tions of the pulpit have commonly been ages of 
equal indifference in the pulpit to the sacredness 



The Materials of Sermons. 129 

of its mission. Either by intellectual puerility or 
by moral corruption, and sometimes by both, the 
pulpit at s such periods has invited the contempt it 
has received. In the time of Charles II. of Eng- 
land, a preacher at the University of Oxford 
attempted to prove that the law of nations was 
revealed to Noah in the Ark. He whiled away the 
time of his seclusion there in adjusting that law r 
to the necessities of the coming world. Another 
University preacher defended the use of instru- 
mental music in public worship, on the ground 
that certain notes of an organ were an antidote to 
the power of Satan over the spinal marrow of the 
worshipper. Such were the puerilities of the 
pulpit which it was the mission of the Puritans to 
displace. 

56. The obligations of the pulpit to the Puri- 
tans are not less than those of theology. Queen 
Elizabeth was a Papist in her antipathy to free 
preaching. She had the instinctive hostility of 
a despotic monarch to any power which could 
share with the throne its sway of the popular 
thinking. 

At one period during her reign, all preaching 
was forbidden throughout the realm. Afterwards 
she admitted it in driblets. She said that one or 
two preachers in a diocese were sufficient. In 
London many churches were closed by the dearth 
of priests who could preach respectably. In many 
rural parishes it was difficult to find priests who 
knew enough to read intelligibly the baptismal 



; 



130 My Note-Book. 

and the burial services. Infants were unbaptized. 
The dead were " buried with less respect than 
heathens." " Many there are," says Bishop Sandys, 
" who hear not a sermon once in seven years." 
" In Cornwall," Neal says, " there was not one man 
capable of delivering a sermon." In 1563 the 
University of Oxford had but three preachers, and 
they were Puritans. 

The Puritans changed all that semi-heathenism. 
Their first conflict with the Queen was in defence 
of their liberty to preach when and where they 
pleased. It was to remedy the dearth of preaching 
that they instituted their famous "prophesyings." 

57. A good general test of the themes of sermons 
is the degree of their congruity with the average of 
the popular thinking in times of religious awaken- 
ing. Make the eternal verities a reality to one 
mind, and you produce an effect which all preach- 
ing is designed to create in the individual. Ex- 
tend that sense of eternal realities to the general 
mind, and you have all that is essential to a re- 
vival of religion. The " Great Awakening" under 
President Edwards and his associates was no 
more than such a response of society to visions of 
Eternity. Materials of discourse in the pulpit 
which fit in congruously with such a popular 
awakening cannot as a general rule be out of 
place. If in exceptional cases they are untimely, 
something in the drift of the popular thought is 
abnormal. A prolonged strain of such preaching 
has the indubitable sign which all eccentric and 



The Materials of Sermons. 131 

untimely things have of unfitness to the supreme 
objects of the pulpit. The normal condition of 
fallen mind is moral stupor. The normal effect 
of Christian discourse is a state of quickened 
sensibility to eternal things. 



VI. 

METHODS AND ADJUNCTS OF THE PULPIT. 

1. The Christian pulpit is a power allied with 
powerful auxiliaries. That is never its normal 
working in which it quiescently holds its own. It 
deals with truth so stupendous, in exigencies so 
perilous, that its failure to rouse and agitate the 
world is against nature. When the Apostles 
" turned the world upside down," they were in the 
exact line of success which their mission contem- 
plated. Less or other than that would have been 
failure against all reasonable probabilities. Noth- 
ing short of apostasy is so ominous of spiritual 
decay as a state of moral quiescence under the 
preaching of a live man. To achieve nothing 
is to achieve everything that the confederated 
powers of evil can desire. Absence of progress 
is retrogression. Absence of life is death. Dr. 
Chalmers sounded the note of warning for all 
time in saying : " Christianity is naught when it 
has become only a force of respectability." 

2. Subjects which hearers do not understand, 
they are abundantly able to misunderstand. They 
can grasp and appropriate recondite errors with 
which they have secret moral affinities. Moral 

132 



Methods and Adjuncts of the Pulpit. 133 

affinity is more than the equivalent of intellectual 
force. Hearers need, therefore, in the pulpit, 
methods and auxiliaries to pure truth which create 
an intense way of putting things. Light must 
often put on the glare of lightning. Logic must 
be set aflame. Our Lord's way of putting things 
was eminently pictorial. That which men heard 
from His lips they saw. The eye reduplicated the 
ear. His words were the utterance of an intense 
mind. He never spoke a dull thing. 

3. Young preachers need self-discipline in the 
selection of the books they read in the early years 
of their ministry. Reading should be such as to 
stimulate healthy growth. Two things then put 
their culture in peril. One is the fact that those 
are the plastic years in the building of character. 
A preacher in that initial decade of his life's work 
absorbs the elements of manhood as from an atmos- 
phere, not conscious of its sources. The other is 
that those are peculiarly independent years in the 
building of opinions. If a preacher is ever scep- 
tical or tangential in his convictions, he is so then. 
Those are the years in which chiefly he comes 
under the sway of the subtle oppugnation which 
the new generation feels towards the old because 
it is old. He is apt to be jealous for his inde- 
pendence. Consequently, at that period a young 
preacher is exposed to the tyranny of school in 
opinion and in taste. 

4. A certain preacher is now living who, thirty 
years ago, became fascinated by the writings of 



134 My Note-Booh. 

Frederick Maurice. He read Maurice ; he theolo- 
gized in the grooves of the opinions of Maurice ; 
he preached Maurice. An educated hearer famil- 
iar with Maurice could detect the thoughts and 
style of Maurice in a series of sermons by his 
disciple through an entire winter. The vocabulary 
of Maurice w r as perceptible even in his prayers. 
To this day, after a score and a half of years, he 
has not outgrown Maurice. Twists of opinion and 
a certain indecisive tone in his style remain to bear 
witness to the tyranny of one mind over the sen- 
sitive years of his early growth. Any author who 
charms a youthful preacher so powerfully should 
be held at arm's length for a while. The mind 
should take time to grow around him, not under 
him. 

5. The reading of religious diaries by preachers 
as a means of spiritual culture needs to be con- 
ducted with precaution. Some of them should be 
read in a defensive mood. Many of them have 
been written by men of whom it has been said that 
" they were born with knives in their brains." 
They had an overgrown taste for self-dissection. 
Sometimes this produced a barbarous type of 
vivisection. A robust religious temperament is 
requisite to write or to read an intense Christian 
diary with profit. Ecstatic piety disheartens by 
contrasts. Hypochondriac convictions debilitate 
by example. Religious experiences w r hich are self- 
condemnatory and lugubrious are always open to 
suspicion. The best Biblical examples of piety are 



Methods and Adjuncts of the Pulpit. 135 

jubilant. A pastor who must bear the burdens of 
other men should have no needless burdens of his 
own. 

6. One diary, written by a clergyman of the last 
generation, and devoted chiefly to his own mental 
history, was revised by his own hand, not long 
before his decease, with a view to its posthumous 
publication. That fact alone should have for- 
bidden its publication. The revision must have 
caused the interpolation of unconscious quackery. 
As literature the volume belongs to the depart- 
ment of religious fiction. 

7. A capital hint for preachers is found in the 
reminiscences of a friend of Arago respecting his 
tact in lecturing to a new audience on Astronomy. 
It was his habit to look around and find the hearer 
of dullest look, of lowest forehead, of most inani- 
mate attitude, and to lecture to that man as if he 
were the only auditor. The lecturer framed defi- 
nitions for him, selected illustrations for him, drew 
diagrams for him. He was confident that if he was 
successful in awakening that dullard's interest, he 
was sure of the rest. Daniel Webster and Rufus 
Choate used in their own way to practise a similar 
elective policy in the Court-room. Mr. Choate 
once said that there was always one man on the 
jury, to secure whom was to secure all. In ways 
practicable to the pulpit, preachers may com- 
monly command the majority of an audience, by 
interesting profoundly the less cultivated or the 
more indifferent minority. In any case, to indi- 



136 My Note-Book. 

vidualize the aim of a discourse will sharpen its 
point. 

8. Modern civilization gives to the ministry 
facilities for knowing men superior to any that 
existed in ancient times. We can know our audi- 
ences, what they are, what their temptations, what 
the popular currents of opinion and of taste, if we 
exercise reasonable vigilance and the tact of com- 
mon sense. A daily newspaper lays open real life 
to our study with a degree of accuracy and com- 
prehensiveness which was not attainable even a 
century ago. Probably the issue of the New York 
Tribune for six months presents a panorama of 
metropolitan life to-day which the sum total of 
Greek literature now extant does not contain of 
real life in ancient Athens. 

9. Our colloquial vocabulary contains a word 
not often used in dignified discourse, yet a good 
old English word which has never become obsolete. 
It expresses a faculty which the ministry greatly 
need to cultivate in their study of men. It is 
"gumption." For the acquisition and the tactful 
use of knowledge of human nature, give us above 
all other men the man of gumption. That incan- 
descent vision which sees through men with a 
clearness that burns is needful to give a public 
teacher command of men. It resembles that qual- 
ity in our Lord's mental character which led His 
biographer to say of Him that He knew what was 
in men. There are men whose eye makes the eye 
of other men drop. The mental eye of one who 



Methods and Adjuncts of the Pulpit. 137 

would move men by discourse needs such piercing 
vision that he shall not only know men, but shall 
make them know that he knows them. 

10. In our Lord's instructions to the first corps 
of preachers, the personal human element predom- 
inates heavily over the official and the authoritative. 
He commissions them as practical working men to 
a world of working men. They are not to be 
chiefly expounders of creeds, interpreters of tradi- 
tions, men of schools and libraries. No sign of 
superiority to other men is given to them, except 
the fact of their commission to teach ; and that is 
to be done in suffering and at the cost of life. The 
title by which He distinguishes them is drawn from 
their manual occupation. " Fishers of men " rep- 
resents their exalted yet humble calling. Honorary 
titles they have none. His summary of doctrine 
is brief. His directory of practical instructions is 
much more extended. His commission reads : " Go 
ye into all the world; say this, do that." He 
gives them no orders for the government of a 
council or the compilation of a litany. But He 
tells them how to cross the threshold of a private 
house, what to say to its inmates, and how to leave 
it. Their office is much more emphatically instruc- 
tive than cathedral. He does not forbid the 
Church to make them prelates or to call them 
saints ; but not a word does He say to initiate such 
distinctions. 

11. The most noble discourse requires in a 
preacher a conscious redundance of perception be- 



138 My Note-Book. 

yond expression. No man is competent to speak on 
a great theme, till his insight discloses a vast deal 
more than he can say of it. He cannot speak his 
mind upon it till he finds in his mind more than 
he can speak to his own satisfaction. A masterly 
discourse is always the overflow and outflow of a 
full mind. It is ebullient rather than elaborate. 

In this respect preaching resembles what artists 
tell us of the art of painting. Sir Joshua Rey- 
nolds said that " a painter cannot produce a great 
work till he is conscious of a depth and breadth 
and intensity of truth in his subject which he never 
can express in colors." 

12. Perhaps musical composers illustrate the 
principle above stated still more forcibly. Handel, 
in narrating his mental history in composing the 
" Hallelujah Chorus," says : " I did think I did 
see all Heaven before me, and the Great God Him- 
self." In the same sense preaching is a fragment- 
ary utterance. If a man can speak all that he 
knows, he does not know enough to speak. In 
nothing is the proverb more significantly true than 
in a sermon, that " a fool utters all his mind." 

13. Prayer as an immediate preliminary to preach- 
ing has profound disciplinary power. One of the 
most valuable apothegms of Mr. Emerson is : 
" No man can pray heartily without learning some- 
thing." More than this is true. No man can pray 
heartily without a penetration of mental insight 
into spiritual things and an expansion of mental 
force in their expression. Baxter's habit at Kid- 



Methods and Adjuncts of the Pulpit. 139 

derminster of spending in secret prayer the hour 
preceding public worship was in keeping with a 
law of intellectual discipline. Sermons on intract- 
able subjects have often developed themselves 
to the minds of preachers in the few moments of 
preparatory prayer. " In that same hour it shall 
be given you what ye shall say." Probably Cole- 
ridge's opinion, that perfect prayer exercises the 
supreme energy of a finite intellect, is often not 
extravagant. 

14. Preachers suffer a misfortune who have little 
or no opportunity for communion with God in the 
open air. The mental exhilaration which poets 
conceive of in communion with Nature is more 
profoundly real to a Christian believer in converse 
with the God of Nature. In the thought of the 
suppliant a creative Person puts a soul into crea- 
tive Power. When the mind is in tune for it, it 
is difficult to listen to the carols of birds before 
sunrise without spontaneously joining in the song 
as a religious service. Wilberforce in one of his 
letters speaks of his indebtedness to the singing 
birds, in the forests of Yorkshire, for the quicken- 
ing of his devotional fervor. 

15. Probably the majority of pastors makes too 
little of ejaculatory prayer, as a means of asso- 
ciating intellectual with spiritual culture. The 
upspringing of a thought to the Mind of God 
makes a day eventful in one's hidden life. A suc- 
cession of such aspirations makes a day historic. 
Dr. Arnold speaks with great earnestness of the 



140 My Note-Book. 

occult power of such prayer in consecrating life. 
His friends discerned in his colloquial intercourse 
a remarkable interblending of the two worlds of 
sense and spirit. He probably owed it in part to 
his appreciative practice of ejaculatory prayer. 

16. One mind united with God in faith has the 
resources of the universe at its command. " Few," 
not " many," is the emphatic word in Spiritual 
devotion. Where " two or three " are, there is spir- 
itual power. Solitude with God often characterizes 
ministerial service. Then the axiom has redoubled 
significance : " So much solitude, so much char- 
acter." 

17. Dr. Doddridge was one of the most faithful 
of preachers to the duty of prayer preparatory to 
preaching. Dr. Chalmers observes as a marked 
feature of the prayers of Doddridge, many of 
which have been published, the " business-like 
style of his intercourse with God." His whole 
mind seems to have been absorbed in them. They 
have the look of a definite means for a definite 
end. A living American preacher has remarked 
that "prayer is a business to be conducted in a 
business-like way." Mental revery is not prayer. 
Discursive thinking is not prayer. JEsthetic admi- 
ration of the works of God is not prayer. Nothing- 
is prayer but the conscious appeal of the soul to 
God with a conscious purpose to gain an object. 
Prayer thus conducted, in continuity however brief, 
subjects the intellect to the same tension which is 
requisite in earnest discourse to men. A preacher 



Methods and Adjuncts of the Pulpit. 141 

may naturally pass from one to the other, on one 
plane of intellectual energy. 

18. It is remarked by Isaac Taylor that minds 
which are most conversant with sublime truths as 
subjects of devout meditation derive from them 
resources of power in argument. He observes in 
illustration that we find lofty doxologies em- 
bedded in the Epistles of St. Paul, in the midst 
of remonstrant and expos tulatory passages. The 
Apostle's mind seems to seek vigor for the one from 
refreshment by the other. It is one of the count- 
less illustrations of the alliance of devout sensibil- 
ity with intellectual force. 

19. The rapidity with which pastors in active 
service must construct sermons forbids the major- 
ity of them to indulge a fastidious taste. But some 
are pestered by this infirmity. They never know 
when to cease correcting and improving a dis- 
course. Beyond a limited^ criticism, improvement 
does not improve. An eminent preacher of the 
last generation preached one sermon ninety times, 
amending and embellishing it after each delivery. 
A reputation created by a few highly organized dis- 
courses is an infirm one. Its possessor must con- 
stantly nurse it to keep it alive. Sermons are like 
certain jewels which shrink in weight under exces- 
sive polish. The first fresh delivery of a discourse 
is likely to breathe its truest inspiration. 

A fine art like painting may tempt some artists 
like Leonardo da Vinci and Washington Allston 
to leave the work of their lives unfinished through 



142 My Note-Book. 

inability to satisfy their overgrown ideals. But 
preaching is not in any such sense a fine art. It 
is the work of an emergency. When taste over- 
reaches the sense of exigency, a sermon collapses. 

20. The effectiveness of sermons is sometimes 
diluted by excessive quotation, especially quota- 
tion of hymns. A certain discourse taken at 
random from the literature of the recent English 
pulpit contains eleven scraps of lyric quotation. 
Few things give to a sermon so much of conven- 
tional commonplace as the citation of hymns, 
unless they are of prime quality, of recent origin, 
and few. When the hymn commencing " Nearer 
my God to Thee " was fresh in our Hymnology, the 
pulpit persecuted it with quotation. By far-fetched 
connections with subject, it was interpolated by 
preachers till, beautiful as it was, it was worn out 
before its time. 

21. The usage of Congregational and Presby- 
terian Assemblies which represses audible responses 
to the sentiments of a preacher is one of doubtful 
wisdom. It sacrifices sympathy to dignity. On 
the preacher its influence is restrictive as well as 
on the hearer. In supreme efforts of eloquence a 
speaker craves some token of appreciative hearing. 
The instinct of appreciative hearing is to volunteer 
that token. Magnetism in public discourse is like 
a shuttle; it moves to and fro. One of the chief 
sources of the proverbial dulness of sermons is not 
in the sermon, but in the absence of its natural 
adjuncts. One of these is participation by the 



Methods and Adjuncts of the Pulpit. 143 

hearer in the work of the hour. An audience suf- 
fers ennui often for the want of something to do. 
Admit them by the liberty of responsive utterance 
to that which is going on. Their interest in it 
will grow by expression. 

Listeners to secular discourse commonly exercise 
that liberty. If not forbidden, they take it as a 
thing of course. Secular orators often depend 
upon its exercise by hearers. Edward Everett 
used to plan for the responses of his audiences in 
his own movements on the platform. The " Hear! 
Hear ! " of the English House of Commons has 
been reduced to a science by the diversity of its 
signification corresponding to variety of intona- 
tions. The freedom of Methodist congregations 
in responsive hearing has been an invaluable 
stimulus to Methodist preaching. Real eloquence 
gives and takes. 

22. The large majority of preachers are not men 
of genius. The most useful of them are not such. 
The best work in the pulpit, as elsewhere, is per- 
formed by men of average abilities. The most 
effective preaching in the long run is the sensible 
preaching. This is that in which good sense 
appeals to the common sense. It wears well. Cor- 
ruscating discourse burns itself out. Of all vari- 
eties of preaching, that of the pyrotechnic school 
is the most impotent. 

23. Sensible preachers find an encouragement 
in the response which the human mind makes to 
truth pure and simple. This is illustrated in the 



1-44 My Note-Book. 

circulation of certain books. The history of " The 
Imitation of Christ " is monumental evidence to 
the purpose. Four nations claim the honor of its 
production. Two thousand editions of it have 
been published in the Latin language alone. One 
thousand editions have appeared in sixty different 
translations into the French language. Thirty 
translations exist in the Italian tongue. And 
innumerable manuscript editions were extant in 
European libraries before printing became an es- 
tablished art. 

24. Yet from beginning to end the volume does 
not contain a sentiment, or an illustration, or an 
epigram, or a paragraph of artistic style which can 
fascinate a reader by any other attraction than 
that of spiritual truth appealing to spiritual neces- 
sities. It claims no inspired authority. It was 
never a representative of a political or moral re- 
form as some works of fiction of world-wide fame 
have been. It is not cast in lyric form to be sung 
by the people, as the ballads have been which 
nations love and sing forever. 

In a word, it is not popular literature in any 
acceptation of the phrase. To a man of the world 
it is a supremely dull book. 

25. Yet it lives. Why ? Because it is full of 
truth which must live. The world cannot do with- 
out it. Christian faith finds in the book an expres- 
sion of the profoundest aspirations of our moral 
nature. It finds that which meets the great exi- 
gency of sin. Age after age, therefore, minds 



Methods and Adjuncts of the Pulpit. 145 

awakened to the reality of sin have demanded this 
work of one who had made the same discovery and 
had found the remedy. Christian culture has 
thriven upon it. It is full of Christ. It tells the 
story of one to whom Christ had become the most 
profound reality in the universe. The believing 
world, therefore, will have it so long as the world 
stands. Such a literary phenomenon is a prophecy 
of the coming reign of Christ over all nations to 
the end of time. Any pulpit which should be as 
faithful a representative of Christ in a believer's 
experience of His personal friendship would share 
in the same success. 

26. In popular religious awakenings the most 
essential requisite to the power of the pulpit is a 
healthy balancing of opposite truths. A prolonged 
pressure of any one class of ideas which appeal to 
but one side of human nature tends either to stag- 
nation or to fanaticism. Extreme begets extreme. 
The more intense the awakening, the greater is the 
peril. Our moral sensibilities are never very pro- 
foundly moved by great and holy ideas except 
when they act serenely. And this is the natural 
resultant of such ideas touching them at many 
points and qualifying each other. It resembles 
the attraction of gravitation by which planets hold 
each other in their orbits. No more sure sign of 
moral health in the excitements of a revival exists 
than that equilibrium of great forces, which, by 
the stillness of their action, suggest the serenity of 
the Mind of God. 



146 My Note-Book. 

27. The same balancing of great motives is the 
most effective defence against the eccentric ten- 
dency of one-sided religious excitement to run into 
animal passion. Real life often discloses the fact 
that the most exalted sensibilities of our nature lie 
very near to the most debased. Under favoring 
conditions the transition from the one to the other 
is very facile. Hence in great religious reforma- 
tions, the excitation of certain temperaments passes 
over from spiritual convictions to animal impulses. 
It vaults over even from spiritual ecstasy to animal 
passion. The history of the Anabaptists of the 
sixteenth century was polluted from this cause. 

28. Other things being equal, the most infirm 
pulpit is that which is sustained chiefly by polemic 
discussions. The most potent truths, the most con- 
clusive arguments in their defence, and the most 
pungent applications of them to the conduct of life, 
their opponents rarely discuss. Discreetly they let 
the strong points of our faith alone. Polemic dis- 
course, therefore, is apt to be beguiled into inferior 
lines of thought. The surest method of accumu- 
lating unimpressive and lukewarm materials for 
the pulpit is to follow in the wake of the current 
unbelief of the day. 

29. That is a perilous liberty which we take 
with the Scriptures in which we claim that our 
own interpretation and infidelity constitute the 
sole alternative. Before the emancipation of our 
colored people, this was the argument on both 
sides of the great debate. Said the advocate of 



Methods and Adjuncts of the Pulpit. 147 

slavery : " The Bible surely justifies human servi- 
tude : if not, it does not deserve our trust in it as 
the Word of God." The abolitionist responded: 
" The Scriptures cannot befriend the institution of 
slavery: if they do, they cannot be a revelation 
from Heaven." Such is often the spirit of over- 
confident exegesis. We have no right to put a 
Divine revelation in power to any such hazards. 
The Scriptures mean what they do mean, not what 
they must. We come to them as inquirers under 
pledge of extreme modesty. It is not our province 
to construct exegetical dilemmas from which they 
must extricate themselves or go into obsolescence. 
Our business as interpreters is not to create, but to 
receive, 

30. The pulpit derives great strength from its 
alliance with secret auxiliaries in the make of the 
human mind. Not conscience alone, but the nat- 
ural and acquired allies of conscience are on the 
side of Christian ideas. The sense of honor, the 
instinct of truth, the feeling of reverence, the per- 
ception of beauty, the social affections, the love of 
home, the logical faculty, are all tributaries under 
the lead of conscience to the force of the Christian 
sermon. Every man carries within him an invis- 
ible and silent government, viceroyal in its relation 
to God, and supreme in its relation to the man. 
Every utterance of truth from the pulpit appeals 
to that confederation of moral powers for re-en- 
forcement. Christian birth brings a man into a 
complicated system of tendencies and usages and 



148 My Note-Book. 

beliefs which give to these secret alliances the 
authority of a second nature. Hence arises the 
phenomenon of sudden conversion so often wit- 
nessed in seasons of revival. It is because the 
moral being of the man is already captured in its 
stronghold and waits only for the moment of overt 
decision. Hence also comes another very common 
occurrence in such seasons that men are apparently 
led to a revolutionary change of character by the 
force of truth, pure and simple, with no appurte- 
nances of eloquence or of genius on the part of the 
preacher. 

31. The best defence of short sermons is that 
given by Lamont : " If a sermon is a good one, it 
need not be long ; if it is a bad one, it ought not to be 
long." But the criticism is rather smart than true. 
It is not a fact that all good sermons need not be 
long. On some of the most weighty themes of the 
pulpit a good sermon cannot be brief. The mod- 
ern taste in this respect lowers the tone of the 
pulpit and contracts its range. On some of the 
most suggestive texts of the Scriptures it would 
enforce silence. Boyle has an essay on patience 
in listening to long sermons. But if a live man is 
in the pulpit, and live hearers in the pew, patience 
is not necessary to support a sermon of an hour's 
length on a subject of which a finished discussion 
demands that length. 

32. That is an unwise policy in preaching which 
may be termed the policy of hyperbole. It crowds 
upon the sensibilities of the hearer possible events 



Methods and Adjuncts of the Pulpit. 149 

as if they were probable, or probable events as if 
they were certain. Sensational preaching abounds 
with it. Men tacitly repel it as an imposition on 
their good sense. The possibility of speedy and 
sudden death, the possibility that the present is a 
man's last hearing of the Gospel, the possibility 
that a present rejection of the offer of salvation 
will grieve away finally and hopelessly the Spirit 
of God, — are all true, but to press them on the con- 
science in exhortations to repentance as if they 
were more than possibilities is false motive. The 
momentary impression is more than cancelled by 
the reaction. In real life men act upon such 
future contingencies by applying the law of 
chances. And the chances are by a thousand to 
one adverse to the preacher's intimidation. 

33. Any plea of the pulpit, to be effective, must 
commend itself to the common sense of men. The 
common sense, silently applying to the policy of 
hyperbole the law of chances, rejects them without 
pausing to argue the case. So far as they move 
men at all, they have the effect of a scare. A 
scare nullified is an invitation to apathy. A nim- 
ble spring of good sense lifts men above its reach. 
John Foster says of such appeals that they resem- 
ble a false alarm of a thunderbolt. " A sensible 
man looks out to see if it is not the rumbling of a 
cart." 

34. Christianity never stands upon its dignity. 
One of its first principles is to take men as it finds 
them. It descends wherever man descends. To 



150 My Note-Booh. 

save, it finds. To find, it seeks. To seek, it goes 
where men are. It does not wait to be sought and 
found. A Christian pulpit, therefore, must not 
wait for men to rise to its own level where they 
can receive its message gracefully, tastefully, in a 
scholarly way, contemplatively, or even candidly. 
It will never do to apply to the work of preaching 
the punctilios of a very sensitive self-respect. 

35. The most effective method of proving any 
truth which is implied in human duty is to use it. 
Assume it, preach it by implication, persuade men 
to act it by doing the duty. Make it thus prove 
itself as fact, and time will take care of it as 
dogma. 

36. The rite of confirmation as practised by the 
Episcopal Church, or some equivalent, would be a 
valuable addition to the ceremonial of other than 
prelatical churches. It expresses a truth which all 
evangelical churches believe and their pulpits 
teach. It is a natural recognition of the laws of 
heredity in their Christian working. It declares 
that by the gracious action of those laws the 
children of the Church are in the natural course of 
things brought within her fold. At the fitting 
time this should be expressed in their character, 
and should receive the sanction of the Church by 
her outward symbol. Liable as such a rite is to 
abuse, the absence of it is a greater evil. Con- 
trolled by a spiritual theory of regeneration and of 
Christian living, it may be a powerful auxiliary to 
the Christian family as a tributary to the Church. 



Methods and Adjuncts of the Pulpit. 161 

37. In discourses on the Deity of Christ, it is 
not wise to philosophize on the mystery of the 
Divine existence. Where all is said that can be 
said, it remains mystery still. Assumption on 
Biblical authority is the wider method of treat- 
ment. Treat it as the Mosaic vision of the creation 
treats the origin of light. God said: Let Light, 
be, and Light was. Mystery thus affirmed carries 
in its sublimity the force of proof. Inexplicable 
truth demands imperial thinking. Authority has 
more weight than logic. 

38. A valuable auxiliary to the pulpit is found 
in a vigilant study of Christian families. Allusion 
has been made elsewhere to the theory of revolu- 
tionary conversion, as not natural to the training 
of Christian youth. Neglect of this principle has 
often resulted in consigning youth of Christian 
parentage to a period of religious despair. Not 
the despair of consciously extreme guilt, but the 
despair of Christian fatalism has sometimes been 
the fruit of ill-balanced preaching on the necessity 
of a change of heart. Despair in any form intensi- 
fies guilt. Said one son of believing parents : " I 
had reached my thirtieth year before the duty of 
repentance became a practicable reality to me. 
My youth was spent in fatalistic bondage to the 
theory of convulsive regeneration." 

39. One sign of the active presence of the Holy 
Spirit in a community is that stale truths from the 
pulpit put on the fascination of novelty to the 
hearers. To their electrified sensibilities it seemo 



152 My Note-Book. 

as if they were hearing truth for the first time. 
They are discoverers in a strange world. Awaken- 
ing from a spiritual coma is equivalent to discov- 
ery. Another form which the same phenomenon 
assumes is that of resentment of imagined insults 
in sermons. Hearers listen with the conviction that 
the preacher " means them." Old sermons heard 
before, on repetition are found to be full of per- 
sonal allusions to the hearers. The same truth is 
a song or an outrage, according to the state of 
moral stupor or moral quickening in which the 
hearer receives it. More than once hearers of 
Whitefield's pungent discourses followed him with 
stones in their pockets to punish his insolence. In 
one instance the preparation for assault was the 
preliminary to conversion. 

40. Preachers, when moved most profoundly 
by the Spirit of God, preach under the sway of 
spiritual joy. They are conscious of a newborn 
freedom. In clerical diaries of a former generation 
may be often found an entry recording the labors 
of the Lord's Day like this : " Had great liberty 
to-day." Preachers thus inspired speak like men 
freeborn. Their discourse has a ring of gladness. 

41. A wise man in entering the pulpit will leave 
pet theories behind him. In other professions the 
most inveterate theorizers ignore their favorite 
speculations when the brunt of practical life is upon 
them. Men do not consciously carry theories into 
battle. If they do, they are beaten, as General 
Braddock was on the march to Fort Du Quesne. 



Methods and Adjuncts of the Pulpit. 153 

So it should be with the favorite speculations of 
preachers. The philosophy of the pulpit should 
be the common sense of common life. It should 
be spoken, if at all, unconsciously. Masterly 
preachers speak the things which most obviously 
ought to be spoken. They say what hearers detect 
as necessities to their condition. They speak to 
exigencies. Men in exigencies consciously cannot 
help responding. The want welcomes the supply. 
Hunger greets the offered food. " The common 
people heard him gladly." 

42. Few men adequately appreciate the value 
of the reading of the Scriptures as an ally of the 
sermon. The Rev. Albert Barnes of Philadelphia 
once delivered a sermon with great effect which 
was constructed entirely with Biblical selections. 
They were carefully interwoven so as to make a 
consistent and continuous structure. He said that 
it cost him more labor than an ordinary discourse. 
An English preacher once read as Dr. Johnson 
did, the entire book of Ruth. Some of his charmed 
auditors did not recognize its inspired origin. The 
Rev. Dr. Hawks of New York used to attract 
intelligent men of other professions, not by his 
sermons, but by his inimitable delivery of the Bible. 
The Rev. Dr. McAll of England once said in pub- 
lic : " If the Lord had ordained two orders in the 
ministry, one to preach and the other to read the 
Scriptures, if I could have had my choice between 
them, I would have chosen to be a reader of the 
Word." It was no uncommon occurrence in the 



154 My Note-Book. 

services of Whitefield that hearers were converted 
by his marvellously realistic rehearsal of the Bible. 

43. The usefulness of this adjunct of the sermon 
is confirmed by the policy to which managers of 
City Missions have been led by a long experience 
of the conditions of their work in the employment 
of Bible-readers. The most remarkable revival of 
spiritual religion known in the modern history of 
Sweden was, under the blessing of God, initiated 
and conducted by " Bible-readers " alone. The 
cathedrals were emptied, and the people flocked in 
thousands, some of them walking fifty miles to 
listen to the Lascari, in barns and storehouses. 
Such is the testimony of history. It proves that 
an earnest reader who is not a great preacher may 
so deliver the words of the Scriptures that their 
Divine inspiration shall electrify his intonations. 

44. Golden seasons occur in the history of every 
earnest ministry. They are seasons of coincident 
opportunities. Churches, like nations, have their 
conjunctions of circumstance and tendency and 
resource which promise huge advances. The prime 
quality of sermons then is timeliness. The chief 
virtue of the ministry then is vigilance. Grand 
successes then depend on discovering where men 
are and aiming the message at them as they are. 
The work calls for Divine intuitions. Results 
depend on working in an expectant faith. Preach- 
ers at such crises of spiritual advancement should 
resume the old prophetic title of " Watchmen." 

45. The administration of the pulpit should 



Methods and Adjuncts of the Pulpit. 155 

be conducted in part with the aim at educating 
the Church. Its education in the essentials of 
doctrinal faith, its education in the reasons for 
Christian beliefs, its education in the symmetry 
of Christian graces, its education in methods of 
Christian work, its education in the construction 
and history of the Bible, represent the aims of 
an educated ministry. The blending of balanced 
graces in character is the grand conquest of Chris- 
tianity over human nature. The passive virtues 
alone make an effeminate believer; the forceful 
virtues alone create tough and repellent believers. 
The Christianity of the future will command not 
alone men of silk nor men of steel. A church 
well developed in character and well equipped in 
resources must grow to its maturity and find out 
its mission under wise pastoral training. The chief 
peril of evangelism is its narrowness. By its con- 
centration on one and but one object of the pul- 
pit, it leaves the great bulk of ministerial labors 
undone. 

46. Our Puritan inheritance has led us to un- 
derestimate conversions in early life. The crys- 
tallizing process in the formation of character 
sets at a much earlier period than is commonly 
supposed. Probationary discipline usually be- 
comes decisive of results long before the arrival 
of adult years. The intellect grows more rapidly 
and accumulation of moral ideas goes on with 
more prolific force in the first ten years of life 
than in any other decade. The ideal of the pulpit, 



156 My Note-Book. 

therefore, should include an early engrafting upon 
the minds of the youth of the Church, of the 
duty of consecration to Christ. Beza, in con- 
structing his Will, wrote : " Lord, I thank Thee, 
that, at the age of sixteen years, I was enabled to 
dedicate myself to Thee." As a rule, the ripest 
characters in Christian history are those of the 
early blossom. 



VII. 

CONSCIENCE AND ITS ALLIES. 

1. The moral sense in man is not designed to 
stand alone in the conduct of life and the building 
of character. Alone, it may by its imperativeness 
create an austere character. By its intensity it 
may create a narrow one. Its action is rather 
penetrative than expansive. Hence it comes to 
pass that some of the most conscientious men are 
not the most amiable men. They fall into bond- 
age to ascetic scruples and tyrannical prohibitions. 
Their religion at its best has a ponderous monotony. 
It reminds one of a treadmill. In some men con- 
science develops a singular incongruity. It runs 
in veins. Men are often very scrupulous in some 
things who are very lax in other things. The 
brigands in the Apennines go to the confessional 
most obediently before starting on an adventure of 
robbery and murder. In more civilized life a more 
frequent phenomenon is that men of keen moral 
sense expend its force chiefly in censorious judg- 
ment and remonstrant appeals addressed to other 
men. To such men the times are always out of 
joint, and they are born to set them right. Hence 
comes the malign element in fanatical reforms. 

157 



158 My Note-Book, 

2. Conscience has certain natural allies whose 
working is both regulative and intensive. As con- 
ditions may require, they tend to consolidate the 
impulses of conscience, or to literalize its judg- 
ments, or to fortify its authority. 

3. One of the natural auxiliaries of the moral 
sense is fidelity to eariy ideals of duty. For the 
want of this principle, character at its maturity 
often suffers in moral thrift and symmetry. The 
grand ideals dawn upon a man when his days are 
young. The soul is young then ; the spiritual 
sensibilities are receptive. Morally as well as 
physically he is at the top of his condition. Lofty 
aims have a luminous reality which they are apt 
to lose in after years. Life is a pedestrian tour; 
over portions of it we plod ; we grow tired and 
hot when the noondaj 1 - comes. Thought falls into 
commonplaces. Aspiration flags. We walk with 
eyes downcast. Then we learn to compromise 
principles, to doubt inherited faiths, to act in sus- 
pense of conscience, to dip the flag of achievement, 
perhaps to draggle it in the mire. 

4. That was a far-reaching admonition of Schil- 
ler's: ".Reverence the dreams of thy youth." 
Something better than romance is in that instinct 
of our nature which throws a golden halo over the 
young days. The young ideas, the young hopes, 
the young projects, the young confidences, the 
young loves, the young reverence for great men, 
the young enthusiasms over favorite books, — all 
have a pure and tonic influence in the memory. 



Conscience and its Allies. 159 

A young man gives a costly pledge to Satan when 
he pawns his youthful reverence for woman. That 
is a pledge which is never redeemed. Emerson 
said to the students of Dartmouth College: " When 
you shall say, ' I renounce — I am sorry for it — 
my early visions,' then dies the man in you." 

5. Swedenborg saw in his thirteen years of 
dream-life, that time in Heaven rejuvenates men. 
The oldest there have the most youthful persons. 
There are no decrepit angels. No blind eyes, no 
deaf-mutes, no cripples are there. This was the 
old Greek wisdom fermenting in the Swede's abnor- 
mal brain. u The immortals are always young. 
In like manner the Christian ideal of life perpetu- 
ates juvenescence in its lofty aspirations. Chris- 
tianity has something yet to do for a man, if it has 
not fortified his moral sensibilities by mastering 
the tendency to decadence which years create in 
his thinking and achievement. 

6. Conscience finds a capital auxiliary also in 
an appreciation of the gift of speech, as one which 
is susceptible of Christian uses. If many are con- 
scientious in word who are not so in act, some are 
conscientious in action who are not so in speech. 
A great deal of moral stamina leaks away in drib- 
lets of insignificant and irreligious talk. " Idle 
words " monopolize not a little of the colloquial 
pleasures of cultivated society. Many have the 
gift of prayer w r ho have not the gift of reticence. 
The theory of the origin of language which makes 
it the direct gift of God is at least as probable as 



160 My Note-Book. 

any other. It should be revered as a Divine endow- 
ment. It is akin to the moral sense in its dignity 
and more noble than the sense of beauty. The 
speech of an idle mind is sin. Even the North 
American savage has it among his reverend tradi- 
tions that a deaf-mute is stricken of God. 

7. The majority of men impair their moral force 
by talking too much. A profound insight into 
one side of human nature was involved in the 
Pythagorean device of education, which consigned 
a young man to silence for five years. An im- 
mense amount of falsehood is uttered in uncon- 
scious gabbling. We reasonably distrust a man's 
absolute veracity when we discover that he loves 
to hear himself talk. A portrait of heroic size 
was suggested of Baron Von Moltke, by the criti- 
cism : " He knows how to be silent in seven lan- 
guages." What wisdom, what strength of intellect, 
what weight of character, what latent force, what 
unknown resources, we involuntarily attribute to 
reticent men ! We think that the less they say, 
the more they can say which would be worth hear- 
ing. This is our spontaneous tribute to a great 
virtue. 

8. Our admiration of the gift of silence is some- 
times misplaced. Coleridge's experience with the 
silent man and the apple dumplings is well known. 
A remarkable illustration of the same misjudgment 
has occurred in American history. For a hundred 
years, under the lead of Thomas Jefferson, our 
national conception of the North American Indian 



Conscience and its Allies. 161 

was that of a marvel of dignity and self-control 
for his power of taciturnity. Jefferson taught us 
to consider a Mohawk Council-fire a model for 
Senates. But the Rev. Dr. Palfrey has pricked 
that bubble. He claims that aboriginal taciturnity 
was sheer stolidity. In his best condition the 
Nipmuck chief said nothing because he had nothing 
to say ; and he fell asleep at that. The savage 
mind was void of ideas. He had therefore the 
cunning to hold his tongue. 

9. Of all men most infirm in the virtues col- 
lateral to the moral sense are the buffoons in speech. 
They are apt to be dwarfs and cripples in enter- 
prise. In an emergency they seldom know what 
to do till graver men teach them. They are bank- 
rupt in resources when men of resources are most 
needful. Events outwit them. Such men are out 
of place in an awakened world. Two classes of 
men are never buffoons, very great men and very 
good men. Great thoughts in the one class and 
great virtues in the other give solidity to character 
and intensity to thinking-power. Life centred in 
anything either great or good, men do not fool 
away. 

10. The moral sense is broadened and deepened 
as an element of character, by reverence for one's 
occupation in life as a part of one's religion. We 
are often admonished to make a business of our 
religion. It is quite as essential to right living 
that a man should make a religion of his business. 
This means vastly more than that he should not be 



162 My Note-Book. 

a liar and a cheat. It means that he should be 
unselfish in his business. He should conduct it 
on principles of benevolence. A Christian pur- 
chase or sale implies reciprocity of profit. That 
fine sense of right and wrong which makes a man 
seek opportunities for generous giving should make 
him generous in a trade. 

The whole theory of commercial life which 
makes it a conflict between competitors, in which 
each must grapple with the other as a foe, is un- 
christian. Like everything else which is unchris- 
tian, it is unmanly. Character suffers an immense 
degradation from the ascendency of such a prin- 
ciple in that which occupies the larger portion of 
a man's waking hours and absorbs the best ener- 
gies of his manhood. Money-making conducted on 
that principle makes hard men. In no other form 
does selfishness crystallize into a type of evil so 
fixed and unimpressible. Character thus indu- 
rated in wrong is harder than the metals of which 
money is made. These can be made fluid by fire ; 
the other by nothing but the breath of God. 

11. One who has the means of knowing declares 
that a growing atrophy of benevolent instincts is 
perceptible in the recent history of civilized com- 
merce. He affirms that there is less of sponta- 
neous giving than there was fifty years ago. There 
is less of gratuitous service between man and man. 
Everybody must be paid for everything. Com- 
petition is more relentless and pugnacious. The 
morals of trade have become the morals of war. 



Conscience and its Allies. 163 

Why should it not be so if " competition is the life 
of business." Says another keen observer : " The 
ways of trade have become selfish to the borders of 
theft, and supple to the borders of fraud." Allud- 
ing to the oaths of the Custom-house, the same 
censor of public morals adds : " We eat and drink 
and wear perjury in a hundred commodities." 

12. It is by no means certain that the increase 
of organized beneficence is a fair substitute for the 
ancient ways in keeping the elements of character 
in fine accord and in concerted tribute to a noble 
life. Indeed, glaring instances occur in which or- 
ganized giving makes not a whit of difference in 
the grip of selfish grabbing. It is reported that a 
merchant of New York, whose name appeared in 
subscription lists for twenty years, prided himself 
on the fact that he had not in all that time per- 
mitted a youthful tradesman to succeed in that 
city who had learned his business in the princely 
merchant's complicated and colossal commerce. 
He crushed such beginners by underselling them 
at his own cost. He claimed the right to do it 
because he had the power — and is not competition 
the life of commerce ? His principle of life was 
that of England's freebooter, — 

" That they should take who have the power, 
And they should keep who can." 

Would even fabulous wealth and the prestige cre- 
ated by amassing it have glossed the reputation 
of a man fifty years ago who conducted his busi- 



164 My Note-Book. 

ness in that Satanic style ? Defaulting cashiers 
and treasurers ought not to surprise us ; they are 
germane to the soil ; they breed in the atmosphere 
of commercial life, if conducted on the principle 
of selfish competition. 

13. The moral faculty, enlightened by Christian 
training, is expansive almost without limit in its 
affinities with the professions and trades by which 
men earn their livelihood. Labor is a factor in 
man's destiny by Divine decree. Natural religion 
adopts it in the name of God. Revealed religion 
baptizes it in the name of Christ. Both dignify 
and sanctify it when performed under the suprem- 
acy of a good conscience before God and man. 
Professor Agassiz used to say that, " on the large 
scale of things a physical fact is as sacred as 
a moral principle." So the Christian law of con- 
science takes into its embrace all secular occupa- 
tions and blesses them. They are all religious if 
conducted on Christian principles. As it respects 
the time they consume, and the mental and moral 
forces they expend, they constitute the chief relig- 
ion of the majority of good men. 

14. In comparison with the religion of secu- 
lar duties, certain more demonstratively religious 
habits may be overrated. The moral sense of 
some men is — we will not say perverted, but — 
Averted from their best vocation. Christian work 
directly for the conversion of men to an actively 
religious life is not the highest vocation of every 
man. Not every man is an expert in it. It is 



Conscience and its Allies. 165 

sometimes laid upon the conscience unwisely and 
with excess of pressure. A keen observer of men 
has published an essay on the futility of training 
a man to do that which is not in him. We may 
judiciously apply the principle to self-training. It 
is not in some men to talk usefully on personal 
religion. They make a burlesque of it in the 
attempt. They can make shovels or navigate a 
ship more deftly. 

15. It is never wise to fling duty into the face 
of Nature. Conscience is sure to suffer in the re- 
bound. When the sense of duty is adverse to a 
man's natural gifts and tastes and training, the 
presumption is that the moral sense has been mis- 
informed. A Divine decree is lodged in the make 
of a man's mind, which takes precedence of all 
subsequent convictions. Where conscience collides 
with natural infirmity, Nature is an "iron moun- 
tain." 

16. The principle above named is often illus- 
trated in the convictions of zealous men respecting 
the duty of personal effort for the salvation of 
men to which allusion has been made. Those in 
whom Nature has not laid the foundation of suc- 
cess in that kind of service rarely do succeed in it. 
Yet they often feel impelled to it by the type of 
Christian character which is current in our days. 
In such cases Nature often has her way, and con- 
science is angered. A sense of guilt is the con- 
sequence, which a wiser reading of natural laws 
would have forestalled. 



166 My Note-Book. 

17. " Many are the friends of the golden tongue," 
saj^s a Welsh proverb. But in the service of 
religion the golden tongues are not a majority. 
Only one preacher in the history of the pulpit has 
come down to us as the " golden-mouthed." Ease 
in private religious colloquy is more rare than in 
the pulpit. Like kindred gifts, it is not born, it is 
acquired. Often Nature is so set against it, that 
it demands study and prayer, and dubious exper- 
iment, and perilous ventures, and disciplinary 
failures, and infinitesimal successes, and a stout 
persistence, and watchfulness of opportunity, and 
the foil of judicious silences, and a cultivated 
sense of the proprieties, and back of all a far 
insight into human nature, to bring it to any high 
degree of excellence. It is an accomplishment. 
In its best development it takes on the look of 
a fine art. To do it superlatively well, a man must 
serve his time at it. Such men as the evangelist 
Moody are not fashioned in a day. In some men 
the drawbacks of infirmity respecting it amount 
to positive disability. There are some tongue-tied 
Christians. A great misfortune befalls them if 
their religious training has been such that their 
moral sense attaches exclusive or supreme sacred- 
ness to the duty which is out of their power. 

18. Conscience sometimes needs to be liberalized 
in its judgments of men whose chief end in living 
is the accumulation of wealth. We call such men 
misers, worldlings, grovellers ; and some of them 
are such. But other some find the design of God 



Conscience and its Allies, 167 

in their creation in money-making. As there are 
working-bees in a hive, so are there natural money- 
makers in every civilized society. They are made 
for that service to the world in their intuitions. 
They are born to it in their surroundings and 
opportunities. Often it is an endowment which 
has come down to them through generations of an 
accumulative ancestry. All men have iron in their 
blood. Some men have gold. It is their duty to 
be rich. As it is the duty and the honor of some 
men to be poor, so is it the duty and the peril of 
other men to be rich. They sin if they are not so. 
It was a virtue in John Calvin that when he died 
he did not leave money enough to pay the expenses 
of his funeral. That would have been no virtue 
in George Peabody. 

19. An East India merchant of Newburyport in 
its prime once remarked : " I do not understand 
it ; it is due to no merit of mine ; but my ventures 
never fail. I never lost a ship or a cargo. If I 
put a dollar on a shingle and send it to sea, it 
comes back to me doubled." It was that man's 
duty to be rich. Only a contracted conscience 
would have forbidden it. Every man should find 
his religion in the thing he was made for. The 
end of God in his creation should be his end in 
living. Christian heroism can aim no higher : 
Christian martyrdom can achieve no more. Once 
admit as a working principle of conscience that 
secular vocations are intrinsically as sacred as 
that of missionary services, and Christian living 



168 My Note-Book. 

becomes as broad in its range of possibilities as 
it is lofty in the reach of its aim. 

20. Real life illustrates this in grand example. 
The elder Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, in his 
early manhood, desired to choose the ministry in- 
stead of the law as his profession. But probably 
he served God more usefully in the United States 
Senate, where he was for many years what Wilber- 
force was to the British Parliament, — the con- 
science of the whole body, — than if he had given 
his life to a mission to the Zulus. General Have- 
lock believed that he was living for Christ in 
leading his cavalry to the victories of English 
civilization in India, more efficiently than if he 
had spent his days in a curacy in the heathendom 
of London. Who shall say that he was not? 
The order of his superior in an emergency was : 
" Turn out Havelock's regiment for that service ; 
they are never drunk, and they never run." That 
told a grand story of Havelock's moral consecra- 
tion of his work in India. 

21. The moral sense, enlightened by Christian 
training, is so elastic in its versatility that it 
appears paradoxical in its embrace of things dis- 
similar. In the majority of men it does not send 
out the antennce of its affinities to the fine arts. 
These have been defined as " the arts of pleasure." 
They are often degraded to serve " the lust of the 
eyes and the pride of life." Yet they are the 
" end of God in the creation " of some men. Some 
of the masterpieces of mediaeval art were the 



Conscience and its Allies. 169 

work of days and nights of prayer. The temple 
of Solomon was not more religiously designed and 
built than were some of the cathedrals of Cen- 
tral Europe. Madonnas which are the wonder of 
the world were painted by men who worshipped 
them. Conscience claims regency in everything 
that a man should aim to do or to be. The word 
" ought " is the sovereign of all vocabularies. 

22. God is interested in the humblest of the 
mechanic arts. Who inspired Bezaleel to " devise 
cunning works, to work in gold and silver and 
brass " ? One of the most commonplace of trades 
has been hallowed for all time by the fact that our 
Lord was probably a carpenter for fifteen years. 
If a man can make shovels better than he can do 
anything else, then his "calling of God in Christ 
Jesus " is to make shovels. It is a high calling. 
His work may be uplifted into the realm of " the 
sublime and beautiful " by the motive force which 
he puts into it. That may uplift him as well. 
One of the most eminently useful men in Massa- 
chusetts spent his life in the manufacture of pins. 
A life of working sympathy with Christ, though 
passed in the forecastle or in a coal mine, will make 
a man of anybody. Angels will respect him. 

23. Our moral nature is many-sided. Its full 
development involves principles of which one quali- 
fies another. The views foregoing are modified by 
the fact that conscience finds one of its natural 
allies in reverence for mind as the superior of 
matter. Dr. Johnson observed that whatever 



170 My Note-Book. 

makes a man more thoughtful of the future than 
of the present elevates him in the scale of thinking 
beings. The same is true of anything which gives 
him an adequate appreciation of mind as the sov- 
ereign of matter. In the conduct of life and the 
building of character on Christian principles, we 
find occasion to apply this, among other things, to 
benevolent activities. Without it we fall into a 
low grade of benefactions. 

24. A man once held office in a church in Bos- 
ton, who was severely conscientious in self-disci- 
pline, but who could not see the necessity of 
colleges and institutes of science. The " Boston 
Shoe and Stocking Society," which watched over 
the necessities of neglected children, was his pet 
above all other benevolent organizations. He once 
spoke contemptuously of an audience assembled to 
hear a lecture from Professor Agassiz on Ichthy- 
ology. " Fifteen hundred full-grown men and 
women," said he, " spending an hour to hear a man 
talk about the construction of a Connecticut River 
shad ! " Yes, they were " full-grown," and he was 
not. His generous contributions to objects of 
charity never rose in spirit above the level of his 
shoestrings. 

25. Ours is a materialistic age. It exalts wealth 
immoderately in its measurements of men. The 
consecration of wealth is esteemed the most effec- 
tive way of doing good. We call it " substantial " 
benevolence; as if a thought had less substance 
than a dollar, and character had less weight than 



Conscience and its Allies. 171 

gold. How many of the thousands who have 
heard and read it have appreciated the reply of 
Agassiz to an offer of a lucrative office : " I have 
no time to spend in making money." 

26. Reverence for mind as the superior of 
matter in conscientious ways of living changes all 
this. It lifts character to a loftier grade of being. 
We learn from it that to make men is a nobler 
achievement than to make things. -" A man's life 
consisteth not in the things which he possesseth." 
A "McCormick Reaper" is a marvellous inven- 
tion, but to have trained the boy, McCormick, and 
steered his life clear of the perils of youth into the 
solidity of manhood, was a greater thing. Ruskin 
says: "It is better to build a beautiful human 
creature than to build a beautiful dome." Sir 
Humphry Davy's remark, "My best discovery 
was Michael Faraday," contained a principle of 
all the nobler uses of life in beneficent activity. 
Every man has it in him to " discover " another 
man. Insular living is obsolete. It belonged to 
the age of the cloister and the hermitage. Yet 
character as contracted and monotonous as that 
of the monastery may grow from the concentration 
of moral sensibilities on tilings, to the neglect of 
men. 

27. Every young man, therefore, before he falls 
into ruts of materialistic living, should ask him- 
self : " Where is the brother man whom I can help 
to be or to do the thing he was made for? " Find 
a lodgement for your thought in something which 



172 My Note-Book. 

can think. When you have found it, make a bee- 
line for it. Do not dally with preliminaries. Some 
men spend their lives in getting ready. Let not 
the evening sun leave you where the morning sun 
found you. Set something to working, on the 
spur of the moment, though it be but an ejacula- 
tory prayer, towards the end of transfusing your 
life into another life. You thus put yourself en 
rapport with the whole illimitable network of spir- 
itual agencies which fills the universe. You 
become one of the powers of the air and the land 
and the sea and the untraversed spaces. 

28. Another auxiliary of conscience in the con- 
duct of life is a certain blending of emotive force 
with self-mastery. It creates that balance of inten- 
sity and solidity which is essential to the best type 
of working power. Held under tribute to a good 
conscience, it reduplicates the force of that as a 
power of control. It transforms the advices of 
conscience into decrees. 

29. Do we not find among the emphatic men of 
the world a class whose first impression upon us is 
that of their intensity ? They are not merely men 
of impetus ; they are that and more. They have 
resources which seem as if moved from under- 
ground. The intensity which they put into their 
life's work resembles the still, red heat of kindled 
anthracite. Often they are silent men. But their 
thinking goes out to other men in action, which 
makes them involuntary leaders. From men of 
this class come seers of distant truths anl pioneers 



Conscience and its Allies. 173 

of coming revolutions. Whatever their life's work 
is, they take it up as if they were made for it only. 
They do it with a grand self-abandonment. 

30. On further acquaintance with them, the 
men now referred to disclose to us, in alliance 
with their intensity, a self-collection which gives 
them weight and poise. Their will-power is put 
to service primarily in self-control. Many are 
great in will-power towards other men. They are 
full of will ; that is, wil-ful. But the class now 
under review are great in will-power, in the form of 
self-mastery. By sheer weight of character and 
singleness of aim, they hold well in hand their 
impetus. They do not lose their balance in the 
rapids of affairs. They live a solid central life. 
Centrifugal and centripetal forces offset each 
other and keep them clear of tangents. Their or- 
bits are planetary, not cometary. Men call them 
level-headed, and say of them : " We always know 
where to find them." 

31. It is marvellous how promptly other men 
call men of this balanced character to leadership 
in emergencies. They are always in demand in 
the making of history. They always have the 
right of way. We call them to represent us in 
Church and State. We never give them instruc- 
tions. We should as soon think of giving instruc- 
tions to sun-dials. Their thought is our vote. 

32. In the published account of the catastrophe 
on the Eastern Railroad at Revere, some years ago, 
it was said that there was one man who sprang 



174 My Note-Book. 

unbidden to the post of control. In the horrors 
and agonies of the scene, he was the only man who 
was master of circumstances and of himself. He 
alone " knew what to do next." Nobody knew 
who he was, or whence he came. He had no offi- 
cial authority. But he took authority, as by right 
of the strongest. He said to this man, " Go," and 
he went ; and he said to that man, " Do this," and 
he did it. Ity common consent, the awestricken 
crowd turned to him as the born leader of them 
all. He possessed that rare proportion of emotive 
force and self-government which gives control of 
other men in crises. 

On a limited scale this illustrates the style of 
manhood always demanded in the making of his- 
tory. The success of such men is foreordained. 
It was written in the decree of their creation. 

33. This kind of intense yet consolidated char- 
acter becomes imperial in its command of men and 
its subjection of events, when in consecrated alli- 
ance with a good conscience. It gives to Christian 
character depth and breadth and a huge momen- 
tum. It redoubles in appearance the amount of 
conscience ; lifts it above pettifogging scruples ; 
holds it clear of popular superstitions ; and gives 
it a propelling force in the government of men, 
which has the steadiness and stillness of the 
planets. In great religious awakenings, such men 
know how to be progressive without running wild. 
They know how to be conservative without block- 
ing the way. 



Conscience and its Allies. 175 

34. Other things being equal, ch-aracter made 
up of balanced opposites is the style of manhood 
which in varying degrees Christianity tends to 
develop. Christianity has a wonderful command 
of proportion in the making of a man. According 
to the amount of character which each man's na- 
ture can carry, it puts the two elements of force 
and weight in even poise into men of average abil- 
ities. Under its inspiration, the best work of the 
world is done by men of sense rather than by men 
of genius. 

35. The moral sense finds a capital ally in the 
sense of personal honor. So high has this virtue 
ranked among civilized graces that it has sometimes 
usurped the place of conscience. Men of noble 
birth have made it a substitute for religious faith. 
When Lord Chesterfield was inquired of what was 
his religious faith, he replied : " I am an English 
gentleman." The germinating of this virtue is 
one of the first premonitions which boyhood feels 
of coming manhood. Often it takes precedence of 
conscientious principle. The dialect of the play- 
ground has coined a word for it,- — " honor-bright." 
Even thieves proverbially cling to it when all other 
virtues have taken flight. 

The design of God in interweaving this prin- 
ciple with the fibres of our moral being in such 
close affinity with conscience appears to be to 
furnish an auxiliary inspiration to its judgments 
where they are obscure, and an auxiliary force 
where their authority is weak. The resultant 



176 My Note-Book. 

working of the two allies often is to tone up the 
whole man to a loftier ideal of character and of 
conduct. 

36. Debility in the sense of honor is the moral 
disease most frequently charged upon the charac- 
ter of otherwise conscientious men. In nothing 
else is the popular criticism of Christian profes- 
sions so severe. Men say of a certain Christian 
believer, representative of a class : " He is a pious 
man ; but he will do mean things. His religion is 
of coarse grain. He has the gift of prayer, but a 
tongue as glib in coloring the facts in a trade. He 
will not tell lies, but he tells very corpulent truths. 
He is not a thief, but men like to have things in 
writing when they have dealings with him." 

37. Cynical criticism is never just. But it is 
often sprinkled with iotas of truth which a man 
who is scrupulous in the point of honor will not 
ignore. In real life, up to the limit of his culture 
a thorough-bred Christian is a thorough-bred gen- 
tleman. He cannot do a mean thing. He will not 
equivocate. He will not hang his veracity on the 
difference between the singular and the plural of a 
word. His moral sense knows no distinction be- 
tween his word and his oath. His oath at the 
Custom-house is as sacred as in the witness-box. 
In either, he is not afflicted with an intermittent 
memory. Conscience regulates his silences as 
honorably as his speech. In secret before God, 
the meanness of sin augments the burden of his 
sorrow. 



Conscience and its Allies. 177 

38. It is in the fine points of character chiefly 
that real life calls for the alliance of conscience 
with the sense of honor. This is a rough world. 
Sin is innately coarse-grained and full of gnarls. 
The usages which it popularizes are degrading. 
The civilization which it creates, if left to itself, 
rots. Treacherous and obscure and malign powers 
are in the air of a fallen world. In such a world 
life tempts the moral sense to a perilous stretch of 
fibre. If a Christian is true to his conscientious 
convictions, he must do many odd and some unre- 
spectable things, as the world goes. Jesus Christ 
did such things. The toughest trial of a young 
man's faith often is the loss of social caste to which 
obedience to his sense of right subjects him. 

39. Moreover, the morals of the world are a vari- 
able quantity. A sea-captain once sought pastoral 
advice upon an adventure which had been more 
satisfactory to his purse than to his Methodist con- 
science. The contents of his purse burned in his 
pocket. When he had told his story, the pastor 
inquired : " Do men of your profession commonly 
approve of such transactions ? " " Oh yes ; " he 
replied, " the morals of the sea are not the morals 
of the shore." Again came the inquiry : " Did you 
ever tell your wife and children the story you have 
told me ? " He was dumb. A few months after- 
wards he wrote that he had made restitution. He 
could look now his children in the eye. 

In such a bewildering labyrinth of right and 
wrong as that which commerce has built on a chaos 



178 My Note-Book. 

of truths and half-truths and falsehoods and false 
silences, a man needs every refining and ennobling 
principle which he can command, to save his con- 
science from degeneracy and his whole character 
from caving in. 

40. In this point of honor often appears the 
auxiliary force of a liberal education to a good con- 
science. It was observed in our Civil War that 
recent graduates and undergraduates of Yale and 
Harvard colleges, men of gentle birth and delicate 
build, though never under fire before, would stand 
a hotter fire without flinching than robust men of 
heavier weight and tougher brawn. Certain sen- 
sibilities inherited from scholarly fathers, and 
developed in the still alcoves of libraries, made 
their sense of honor indomitable in its fidelity to 
the right. Such men died by the score, to whom 
it never occurred that they could skulk. 

41. The Duke of Wellington observed the same 
thing at Waterloo, in the sons of the English 
nobility. When ruder men sneered at their deli- 
cate complexion and feminine fingers, he answered : 
" Yes ; but the puppies fight well." A cultivated 
sense of honor has a fineness of vision and wiry 
tenacity which are often the very things that con- 
science needs to enlighten its judgments and make 
its authority supreme. The blunt thrust of the 
moral sense needs, on occasions, to be re-enforced 
by the suave impulsions of self-respect. Exigencies 
and surprises occur in which it is well if a man is 
too proud to smirch his soul. 



Conscience and its Allies. 179 

■42. That was a thing to be remembered and 
revered through all time, which Algernon Sydney 
wrote to his father from his dungeon, a few days 
before he left it for the scaffold : " I have ever had 
it in my mind, that when God should cast me into 
such condition that I cannot save my life but by 
doing an indecent thing, He shows me that the 
time has come when I should resign it." The 
world will never take the name of such a man in 
vain. Yet every man of rounded and finished 
Christian character is such a rounded and finished 
gentleman. 

43. The principle of the education of the moral 
sense, to which allusion is elsewhere made, is often 
illustrated in modern experience. The Rev. John 
Newton, to whom also reference has been made, 
was converted to spiritual Christianity before he 
had abandoned the slave-trade. He says that on 
his last voyage to the African coast for a cargo, he 
" experienced sweeter and more frequent hours of 
Divine communion than he had ever before known." 
Again he writes of his infamous occupation : " No 
other employment affords greater advantages for 
promoting the life of God in the soul, especially 
to one who has command of a ship " ! This is the 
testimony of a slave-trader. Yet the piety of John 
Newton in the record is scarcely more questionable 
than that of St. Paul. 

44. The appalling contradiction is to be recon- 
ciled by the same principle which interprets the 
ethical mysteries of the Old Testament. The 



180 My Note-Book. 

moral sense of England under which John New- 
ton was born and bred took no cognizance of 
the slave-trade as a sin. It was legitimate com- 
merce. English law authorized it. The English 
navy furnished consorts for its protection. Eng- 
lish statesmen participated in the profits of it. 
English bishops blessed it as a missionary enter- 
prise for the Christianizing of Africa. The national 
conscience made no protest against its barbarity. 
Only an individual, here and there, had discovered 
its hideous depravity; and at him the people 
wagged their heads, saying : " He is a madman." 
Ships engaged in the slave-trade often were chris- 
tened with Biblical names. The vessel in which 
Sir John Hawkins brought a cargo of slaves from 
Africa to the West Indies in 1564 bore the name 
" Jesus." Its commander attributed his mercan- 
tile success to " Almighty God . . . who never 
suffers His elect to perish" ! 

In that morally putrescent atmosphere John 
Newton had lived from his birth. His moral sense 
was drugged. It gave out delirious judgments ; 
with slow and stertorous respiration it came into 
spiritual life. He wrote hymns for Christian wor- 
ship which the Church sings to-day, before he found 
out the depth of the moral abyss in which his 
moral nature was rotting. 

45. The same principle explains some of the 
phenomena of conscientious persecution. An un- 
enlightened but an honest conscience founded the 
Inquisition. Torquemada looked unflinchingly on 



Conscience and its Allies. 181 

the agonies of his victims on the rack ; but all the 
while he wore beneath his undervest a chain-shirt 
filled with metallic prongs turned inward upon his 
living flesh. To save his own soul he endured tor- 
ture equal perhaps to that which he inflicted to 
save the soul of a heretic. Philip the Second, 
after capping the climax of judicial tortures in the 
extermination of heresy, endured for months equal 
agony, in which he died like a saint. 

46. Fearful are the contortions of the human 
conscience, and infinite is the condescension of God 
in its disciplinary training. The enormities which 
it perpetrates, when left to the alternate stupor and 
exasperation of a fallen stake, give us some hint of 
what it might have been and might have done if the 
way of salvation had been thrust upon mankind 
impulsively, without a preliminary process of 
moral discipline. 

47. The first thing requisite to the recovery of 
a fallen race was to create a conscience which could 
take in and appropriate a redemptive economy, 
without perverting it to a more appalling and hope- 
less downfall. This was the work of time. In 
this, as in all other works of God, there is a con- 
spicuous absence of high pressure. God seems 
never to be in haste. No magnitude of evil crowds 
His plans to their completion before their time. 
" Rapidity of movement," observes Mr. Gladstone, 
" was no part of the providential design." Ages 
must come and go. Generation must hand over 
to generation the fruits of discipline through a 



182 My Note-Book. 

long line of moral inheritance before the fulness 
of time could appear. That educational history 
the Old Testament records. 

48. A good conscience is good sense. It is 
level-headed in its judgments. It limits a man's 
responsibility to practicable things. Not only 
that, but to things practicable to him. St. Paul 
in his casuistry to the Corinthians puts under the 
sovereignty of conscience the broad principle of 
common sense. When Hortensius invites Marcus 
to meet Aurelius at a banquet, if Marcus happens 
to be a Christian, the Apostle would not counsel 
him to provoke the contempt of the pagan gentle- 
man whose guest he is, by asking where the escu- 
lents on the table came from. He virtually advises : 
" Behave like the gentleman that you are ; act 
like a man of good sense and ask no questions for 
conscience' sake. Where your meat and figs and 
wine came from is not your business ; it is the 
business of your host. It belongs to his conscience, 
not to yours." 

49. The apostolic principle of the limitations 
of conscience covers an immense variety of ques- 
tions of Christian casuistry in all ages. It settles 
all those cases of scruple respecting food and 
drink and purchase and sale which are involved 
inextricably in organic sin. To go beyond or 
under that principle in the application of scruples 
would plunge us into an interminable jungle of in- 
quiries in which conscience would become a Jesuit. 
We should soon find ourselves questioning whether 



(~ f <>)iscience and its Allies. 183 

we may eat or drink or wear or buy or sell or 
give or barter anything respecting which anybody 
has committed sin. We should be in the plight 
of the Hindoo devotee to whom animal life was so 
sacred that he chose starvation rather than to drink 
a drop of water in which the microscope had dis- 
covered to him the gambols of a thousand animal- 
cules invisible to the naked eye. 

50. A caution which inexperienced piety often 
needs is that we should avoid so putting things 
that conscientious scruples shall have the look, to 
others, of religious pettifogging. Frederick Rob- 
ertson has emphasized the fact that " scrupulosity 
about laws positive generally slides into laxity 
about the eternal laws of right and wrong." This 
is that infirmity of a weak conscience which sub- 
jects good men to the charge of cant. No other 
sign of a canting piety is so common or so sure as 
a queasy conscience in little things balanced by a 
lax conscience in great things. But in a great 
right mind, the moral sense is the faculty of 
supreme dignity. 

Under Christian enlightenment it supports the 
dignity of Christian conduct in a multitude of 
things otherwise liable to the world's contempt. 

51. Sin in a good man's consciousness may never 
be all that his severe self-judgment declares it to 
be. It has offsets and alleviations. Even its tem- 
porary conquests of the protesting will are not 
what they seem to be to suspended faith. The 
moral sense, enlightened and balanced by good 



184 My Note-Book. 

sense, never plunges a good man into despair and 
leaves him there. 

Washington Allston was once afflicted with a 
distressing nervous malady. In that condition he 
was on one occasion tempted by an incontrollable 
impulse to profane speech. The reaction of course 
overwhelmed him with remorse. Probably God 
did not judge the artist's moral defeat as he him- 
self did. Coleridge, bringing his philosophy to 
bear on the incident, very aptly said : " Allston 
should have said, c Nothing is I but my will.' ' If 
he did not deliberately will the wrong, it was no 
more sin than the profaneness of a sailor's parrot. 
Good sense should not permit conscience to degen- 
erate into a detective, eager to ferret out the secret 
vagaries of a sick man's brain. 

52. The foregoing incident suggests also that 
there may be strata of virtuous character which a 
man's own mental introspection does not turn up 
to the light of his own consciousness. He may be 
a better man than he seems to himself to be. Bun- 
yan's Pilgrim would have been a better man if he 
had discovered sooner than he did the grace which 
was germinant within him. Bunyan himself would 
have been saved from great suffering and from 
some sin, if his conscience had been more health- 
fully instructed and mollified by good sense. His 
" bell-ringing," of which he accused himself as a 
sin with such savage fidelity, was not to the com- 
mon sense of men a damnable crime. Yet he 
damned himself for it without mercy. There is a 



Conscience and its Allies, 185 

law of unconscious virtue which a delicately trained 
conscience needs to apply to its lurid flashes of 
self-conviction. Character, in both extremes, seems 
to hide itself from self-inspection. In the long 
run, charity is more truthful than severity. Cen- 
soriousness even to oneself is sure to be false in 
some of its judgments. 

Oberlin, it is reported, once fell upon his knees 
in a remorseful prayer, because he had despatched 
a letter in which he had neglected to cross the 
tfs and dot the i's accurately. Ought he not to 
have known better than to picture God to his 
imagination as an irascible writing-master on the 
watch for blunders of chirography ? 

54. The best development of the Christian 
graces, next to that of our Lord, is that which may 
be distinguished as the Pauline development. With 
profound sensibility it unites a sylvan strength 
which bears without despondency honest convic- 
tions of sin. 

In their private portraitures of sin, our fathers 
were sometimes morbid and extravagant. They 
dealt excessively with superlatives. Not that they 
exaggerated guilt in itself considered. No lan- 
guage can do that. But guilt never exists to be 
in itself considered. It exists in the concrete, and 
in the concrete it is never in this world absolute 
and unmitigated. Is a bad man ever as bad as he 
can be ? Guilt in its finished and supreme malig- 
nity exists nowhere but in the world of despair. 

55. The self-convictions of a conscientious man 



186 My Note-Booh. 

should be balanced by the principle that his religion 
has something yet to do for him if his mental habit 
is not one of gladness. A good conscience is a 
conscience at rest. Mental suffering has no place 
in the Christian theory of holy living. Purgatorial 
suffering has no more right to be in this world 
than in the next. Joy, in varying degree from 
peace to ecstasy, is the Christian life. Song is its 
natural language. There was a natural ground- 
work for that provision which an Italian nobleman 
made for an unintermittent and unending anthem 
of praise in the chapel of his palace. This is a 
symbol of St. John's dramatic representations of 
Heaven, in which the redeemed are occupied chiefly 
in holy song. Their moral nature, even when 
exercised upon the stupendous mystery of God's 
retributive decrees, is exalted and kept in even 
balance of its sensibilities, by the service of thanks- 
giving. 

56. Among the balanced virtues which an edu- 
cated conscience fosters are those of a profound 
reverence for the supernatural, and freedom from 
popular superstitions. A Christian believer thor- 
oughly trained in the good sense of the Scriptures 
is not given to Biblical sortilege in his devotional 
habits. He does not hold conference with the dead 
at light-footed tables with light-headed sitters 
around them. He never sees ghosts, or, like TaL- 
fourd, he sees too many to be overawed by them. 
He does not fear to set sail on a Friday, nor to 
dine with thirteen at the table. He does not fore- 



Conscience and its Allies. 187 

bode a death in the family if a dog howls at mid- 
night, nor think that ill luck is in the air if he sees 
the new moon over the left shoulder. He does not, 
as a Boston merchant did, kick every tree on the 
way to his store to insure good luck for the day. 
He does not go back and start anew on his morning 
walk, as Dr. Johnson did, if he began it with his 
left foot foremost. He does not nail horse-shoes 
over the door of his dwelling to keep witches at 
bay. Believers of the " level-headed " conscience, 
by keeping their faith clear of such vagaries, make 
religion respected by making it respectable. 



VIII. 

OUR SACRED BOOKS. 

1. Every great religion which has created epochs 
in history has been the religion of a Book. Of 
such historic religions, Christianity is the oldest, 
the purest, the most prolific of best things, and the 
most enduring. To-day it is the only one which 
has a future. Its Sacred Books contain the oldest 
cohesive literature extant. They contain the only 
credible narrative of the origin of man, of the 
infancy of the race, of the septenary division of 
time, of the introduction of sin, of the cause and 
the moral significance of death, and of the prom- 
ise of redemption. No other sacred records pre- 
sent a respectable outline of the destiny of the 
race from the birth of the first man to the death 
of the last man. 

2. Our holy books are signalized by the evidences 
they contain that their teachings are to be dissem- 
inated chiefly by oral discourse. The religions of 
the world may be classified as the religions which 
can and the religions which cannot be preached. 
The religion of the Bible is pre-eminently one of 
the former class. Christianity has created the pul- 
pit. It addresses the reason and the conscience 

188 



Our Sacred Books. 189 

of man. It asks no credence without proof, asserts 
no claim which does not commend itself to the 
common sense and the moral sense of mankind. 
By these instrumentalities and auxiliaries it prom- 
ises to make conquest of the world. 

3. Four features of the Bible adapt it so forcibly 
to the purpose as to give intimations of the fact 
that its system of thought is to be propagated by 
the pulpit. One consists of the correspondences 
which it reveals to the necessities of the human 
soul and the intuitions of the human conscience. 
The second is a remarkable balancing of related 
truths and welding of half-truths, by which the 
most intense conceptions which the mind of man 
can grasp may be enforced without self-contra- 
dictions. The third is the frequency and the force 
with which it expresses truth in laconic forms. 
The fourth is the fact that it is pervaded by an 
intense personality from beginning to end. Every 
practised preacher has discovered that such ma- 
terials have a superlative fitness to be proclaimed 
by the magnetism of the human voice. An illus- 
trious churchman of England has remarked upon 
the adaptations of the Bible to public speech, that 
it is the only Book extant from which quotation is 
always pertinent. If it had been constructed solely 
for the purpose of furnishing to the pulpit a the- 
saurus of texts and themes and other materials of 
sermons, it could scarcely have been conceived 
more wisely and put together more skilfully. 

4. One of the collateral evidences of the Divine 



190 My Note-Book. 

authority of the Scriptures is their political wis- 
dom. For writings not designed to teach political 
economy, they are wondrously prolific of ideas 
fundamental to the building of States. In this 
respect they are unequalled by any other sacred 
books known in history. 

Liberty as a right of the individual is a corollary 
from the Christian idea of personal responsibility. 
Heathen theories of civil government have never 
made human servitude a wrong in itself considered. 
The principle of federation as a bond of union 
among States and of alliance among nations is a 
Biblical idea. Jonathan Mayhew of Boston in our 
colonial revolution suggested it as a derivative 
from the fellowship of churches enjoined by 
Christ. The principle of a graded judiciary was 
first announced incidentally to the government 
of nomadic tribes under the leadership of Moses. 
The substitution of peaceful expedients in place of 
war in the abolition of organic wrongs is of Script- 
ural origin. The Hebrew lawgiver initiated it in 
legislation upon slavery and polygamy. Bloodless 
revolutions and tranquil reforms are silent trophies 
of Christianity. Serfdom in England has never to 
this daj^ been abolished by act of Parliament. The 
still force of Biblical ideas has stifled it so gently 
that English legislation forgot to say that it should 
exist no longer. A finer example does not appear 
in history of the modus operandi by which the 
Christian Scriptures work out revolution in human 
governments. 



Our Sacred Boohs. 191 

Above all, that fundamental principle on which 
all durable States are built — that national virtue 
is the groundwork of national perpetuity — has 
never been wrought into the building of great 
nations, except among Christianized races. Politi- 
cal economy has never projected it into national 
life. Civilization unevangelized has never lifted a 
people to its level. Experience of the rise and fall 
of nations has never taught the wisdom of it as a 
practical principle of government. Plato thought 
it, but he did not persuade a Grecian State of the 
size of a Swiss canton to build on it as a founda- 
tion of national renown. Only where and when 
and so far as the holy books of Christianity have 
made their way into popular thinking has so pro- 
found yet so plain a principle either created a 
great nation or saved it from decay. 

5. It is a fact of most solemn import to mod- 
ern Republics, that the Bible nowhere recognizes 
democracy as a legitimate form of government, 
except as it is the superstructure of a Theocracy. 
The theory of self-government by a people in their 
own natural right finds no authority in the Script- 
ures. Advocates of monarchical forms have the 
Biblical argument in their favor. So far as this, — 
that the noblest ideal of government must be cen- 
tred in the sentiment of loyalty. And loyalty finds 
its natural centre in a person. Despotism finds its 
centre in the person of the autocrat. The more 
nearly an autocrat approaches the dignity of deity 
in the reverence of his subjects, the more consonant 



192 My Note-Book. 

with Biblical ideas is his right to reign. Constitu- 
tional monarchy finds an object of loyalty, in a 
lame way, in the person of the constitutional sov- 
ereign. The rectitude and the stability of all 
human governments depend on the allegiance of 
the people to some personal representative of Law. 
Loyalty of personal beings to impersonal Law is 
an absurdity. It is reverence of the superior for 
the inferior. It is obedience of a living person to 
a lifeless thing. A Republic must find its centre 
of the loyal sentiment in the Person of the living 
God. Neither the history of the Old Testament 
nor the preachings of the New recognize popular 
governments without the theocratic element under- 
neath. Such is the political wisdom of our sacred 
oracles. 

6. A similar evidence of the Divine origin of 
the Scriptures appears in a feature to which refer- 
ence has been already made — the fidelity with 
which they disclose the secret qualities and uncon- 
scious tendencies of human nature. The amaze- 
ment of the woman of Samaria at our Lord's knowl- 
edge of her unwritten biography is an example of 
the incisive force of the Bible as detective of human 
character in all times. The storied personages of 
the Old Testament are antitypes of men as real 
life discovers them in all ages. No other volume 
in all literature is so human in its disclosures of 
man, and at the same time so Godlike in its revela- 
tion of God. The junction of the two is a pre- 
monition of the Day of Judgment. Man does not 



Our Sacred Books. 193 

know himself, except through some sort of contact 
with the Mind of God. The indignation often 
expressed by hearers of the Gospel, at what they 
suppose to be intentional personalities of the 
pulpit, springs naturally from the preaching of a 
revealed religion. A revelation of the thoughts 
of God starts the retributive machinery of the 
human conscience. 

7. Many of the objections to the ethics of the 
Old Testament spring from ignoring the necessity 
of an education of the human conscience in the 
early ages. The Old Testament is mainly a record 
of a nation's birth and of its training in moral 
sense. There are degrees and varieties of con- 
science. The age, the race, the nation, the tribe, 
has its conscience. Men who appreciate well the 
education of a national intellect are often slow to 
recognize the development of a national conscience. 
Yet the ethics of the Old Testament depend on 
that stage of the national history which it records. 
It is unphilosophical to judge the moral sense of 
one who represents the beginning of that process 
of moral discipline, by that of one who represents 
its end. A Hebrew conscience and a Christian 
conscience may be separated by two thousand 
years of spiritual training. St. Paul may have 
taught as elementary principles ideas, which were 
not intellectually conceivable by the mind of 
Abraham. 

8. The ethics of the Old Testament find their 
toughest knot in the command of God to Abraham 



194 My Note-Book. 

to immolate his son. That command probably 
met with no recoil whatever in the moral sense of 
the patriarch. His parental affection was shocked. 
His patriarchal hopes and ambitions were shattered. 
But the story bears no trace of moral reprobation 
of the deed. Parental sacrifice of children was 
one of the established customs of the age. It was 
done in the discharge of a sacerdotal function. 
In the ethics of the time it was a parental preroga- 
tive. It was founded on the same principle as 
that of the sacrifices of the first brothers of the 
race — that of consecrating to God the best and 
the best beloved. We do not know that the act of 
God forbidding it had any precedent in the patri- 
arch's experience. The whole bearing of the vic- 
tim also gives no evidence of any sense of the right 
of resistance to it as an act of barbarism. That 
was a barbarous age. The conscience of the age 
was in twilight. Men saw spiritual things only 
as by the light of a solitary morning star. 

9. It is absurd, therefore, to hold the moral 
sense of the Chaldean patriarch to the same vision 
of right and wrong which four thousand years of 
moral training have revealed to us. Under his 
moral conditions and with his moral precedents he 
would have been guiltless in the commission of a 
deed for which the Commonwealth of Massachu- 
setts has incarcerated a man for life as a maniac. 
So vast are the diversities contingent on the edu- 
cation of conscience by the inherited discipline of 
ages. 



Our Sacred Books. 195 

10. It is startling, yet refreshing, to note in 
the Biblical treatment of suffering, the boldness 
with which it is attributed to the agency of God. 
We find no adroit concealment or disguise of the 
Divine Hand. We discover no obtrusion of second 
causes to relieve the appalling facts of history. 
The way of science is to evade the name of God ; 
the way of revelation is to proclaim and exult in 
it. Even when tragic story " makes both the ears 
of men to tingle," the more fearful it is, the more 
emphatically does inspiration attribute it to the 
plan of God. A strain of theocratic sovereignty 
runs through all the teachings of the Bible respect- 
ing the origin of suffering. It never happens ; 
it is inflicted. It never springs up in a night ; it 
is foreordained. God thought of it ages before 
it came. He cared enough for the sufferer to 
think of him, to single him out and individualize 
him from uncounted millions ; to call him by 
name, to measure his necessities, to plan the out- 
line of his destiny, and to select and arrange his 
appointed discipline ; and this long before he was 
born. Every sufferer in this " hurt world " is 
enclosed in a golden network of eternal and benig- 
nant decrees. 

11. The treatment of the sorrowing by our holy 
books presents, in one respect, a striking contrast 
to that suggested by the noblest poetry in unin- 
spired literature. Our great poets, except when 
they write under the inspiration of Biblical ideas, 
direct us for comfort to the works of Nature. 



196 My Note-Booh 

They celebrate in lofty song the forests and the 
rivers and the silent skies, for their tranquillizing 
influence upon us, in the agitations of a great sor- 
row. They tell us that " Nature never did betray 
the heart that loved her." But coming down to 
the hard facts of life, who of us ever found it so ? 
Are there not deeps, and " lower deep," beneath 
the billows of a great affliction into which Nature 
cannot follow us ? At her best, she is passionless 
and unresponsive. We feel the absence of reci- 
procity. She hears no prayer. We interrogate her 
wisdom, and she tells us, " It is law." We throw 
ourselves upon her mercy, and she responds, " It 
is law." She knows no deity but Law. When we 
are rocking on the surges of intolerable suffering, 
what do we care for Law ? Law is timely and at 
home in our laboratories and observatories ; but in 
our darkened homes, and in the awful solitude 
Avhich makes the packed streets a wilderness to us, 
we need some other friend than Nature. Yet 
Poetry has no other for us, except when she re- 
hearses the simple Biblical hymns which we teach 
to our children, and sing at our morning and even- 
ing prayers. 

12. Suffering is elevated in dignity by the 
Biblical representations of it as one of the Divine 
instruments consecrated to man's redemption. It 
is not an isolated anomaly. It is not a mystery, 
the solution of which we must find, or seek and 
not find, in its own impenetrable darkness. It has 
part in a grand alliance of beneficent agencies. 



Our Sacred Books. 197 

Not merely is it that suffering is so ruled and over- 
ruled by a strategic Providence that glimpses of 
benevolent design can be extorted from its history. 
This mystery of pain is a gift which takes rank in 
dignity with the gift of prayer. It proclaims eter- 
nal purposes of which a risen and ascended Saviour 
is the culmination. 

13. The Scriptural view of the discipline of pain 
reaches its climax of dignity in the fact that it was 
one of the factors, perhaps the chief, in the personal 
discipline of Christ for his redemptive mission. 
The Bible brings afflicted men and women into a 
very sacred alliance, in its revelation of Him as a 
Man of Sorrows. What they suffer He suffers. 
" In all their affliction He was afflicted." Occult 
emanations of sympathy from the heart of our Lord 
are going into all the homes where believing men 
and women mourn. That sympathy is vibrating 
on the air the world over. 

14. When Isaiah's mysterious visions of a suf- 
fering Messiah were uttered, there was not a blind 
asylum, nor a retreat for the insane, nor a school 
for deaf-mutes, nor a hospital for incurable invalids, 
nor a home for orphans, nor a refuge for the fallen, 
in the world. Sufferers were deemed the objects of 
Divine desertion. The wisest of men placed their 
dead in the tomb, or on the funeral pyre, doubting, 
as Cicero did when his only daughter Althea died, 
whether the doctrine of the immortality of the soul 
were a truth or a myth. It was on the ear of such a 
world that the words of Messianic promise first fell. 



198 My Note-Booh. 

15. We shall the better realize the dignity they 
give to our sacred records by reproducing a single 
scene in our Saviour's life. It concentrates into 
one picture the whole spirit of the Bible in its 
treatment of human sorrow. 

When his friend Lazarus sickened and died, He 
was five and twenty miles away, beyond the Jor- 
dan. He was busy preparing the minds of His 
obtuse disciples for their approaching separation 
from Him. Yet in the distance He felt, as a 
burden on the quivering air, the scene which was 
going on at Bethany. He needed no telephone to 
tell Him of its progress and its fatal ending. His 
own great heart was conscious of its undulations, 
as it thrilled along the electric chords of His sym- 
pathy with the suffering. He drew the sorrows of 
the weeping sisters silently into the recesses of 
His own soul. He brooded over them there as a 
guarded treasure till the hour came when all was 
over. Then, as strong souls in affliction will when 
they have something to do for others, He laid 
aside his own heartache and said to His mystified 
disciples : " Our friend sleeps ; I go to wake him." 

16. The Christian Scriptures disclose as no other 
holy books have ever done, the only credible expla- 
nation of the phenomenon of death in human his- 
tory. We experience a relief from the mystery of a 
natural evil when Ave discover for it a moral cause. . 
Such a cause the Scriptures reveal for the most 
appalling of all natural evils. They tell us of its 
historic origin. They represent it as the fore- 



Our Sacred Books. 199 

ordained sequence, and the threatened penalty of 
transgression. It is the symbol of a great catas- 
trophe. It has a right to be. Something within 
us responds to it, as just and good in a system of 
things devised by a holy God for a moral expres- 
sion of His Mind. So would we have it. In our 
loftiest moods of responsive sympathy with the 
thoughts of God, we see in it a phenomenon of 
most profound and truthful meaning. An evil so 
stupendous as the revolt of a moral world from its 
loyalty to such a Being ought to be branded by 
some sign of its exceeding guiltiness. Wisdom 
and benevolence of stamina! force appear in this 
decree by which a world populated by a rebellious 
race becomes a world of death-beds and graves. 

17. Yet. on the other hand, it is one of the para- 
doxes of Christianity that its sacred books elimi- 
nate death as a terror from the system of things, 
as no other religion has ever done. In the natural 
aspect of it, death is a hideous monstrosity. In 
the Christian aspect of it, it is an illusion. On 
the plane of nature only, it is an appalling catas- 
trophe. On the plane of Christian thought, it is a 
dream. Approaching it from the side of natural 
law. we recoil with horror. Approaching it from 
the side of Christian promise, behold it is not 
there ! Where is thy victory. O Death ? It is one 
of the commonplaces which still are immense in 
meaning, that death never touches the real man. 
With that which thinks and feels and enjoys and 
hopes, death has no more to do than it has with 



200 My Note-Book. 

God. Look at an Egyptian mummy — is that a 
man ? Yet it is the only reprisal that death has to 
boast of. 

18. A service of very peculiar nature and not 
generally known connects the books of our faith 
with the researches of astronomical science. It is 
well understood by experts in astronomy that a 
certain complicated cycle, which should harmonize 
certain intricate revolutions of the solar system, has 
been sought for, for centuries. At last it was, till 
recently, given up as being beyond the reach of 
human discovery. 

But within a few years an eminent Swiss astron- 
omer professes to have found the long-sought mar- 
vel of astronomical science. His researches have 
been submitted to three distinguished astronomers 
of the " Royal Academy of Sciences " in Paris. 
By them it has been pronounced accurate and of 
practical value. 

19. The interesting fact about this astronomical 
discovery is that the discoverer was first led to 
suspect the existence of the cycle, by a study of 
the symbolic prophecies of Daniel. It is well 
known that the majority of interpreters have found 
in those prophecies a period of twenty -three hun- 
dred years, as the measurement in the prophetic- 
visions, of the time which should elapse between 
the age of Daniel and the end of the so-called 
" times of the gentiles " ; in other words, the end 
of this world. The Swiss astronomer — M. de 
Cheseaux, by name — is a devout believer in the 



Our Sacred Books. 201 

Scriptures. In reading the symbolic predictions of 
Daniel, it occurred to him as a hypothesis that this 
period of twenty-three centuries might be the cycle 
so long despaired of by experts in astronomical 
wisdom. On further investigation by astronomical 
methods, he found that it was even so. The 
discoyery led to that of several other cycles, all 
involved in the prophetic computations, and by 
means of which he was able to solve between 
thirty and forty astronomical and geographical 
problems. 

20. He suggests, plausibly, to say the least, 
the inquiry: "How happened it that a Hebrew 
prophet, twenty-three centuries in advance of scien- 
tific discovery, used that occult cycle in his timing 
of coming events in the far-distant future ? " If he 
had conversed with the most eminent astronomers 
of the age, he could not have learned it from them. 
They knew nothing of its existence. If he had 
been himself the most accomplished scientist of 
the century, he could not have discovered it. 
There were no astronomical instruments in exist- 
ence by which the requisite observation could be 
made. The famed astrology of Chaldea, in which 
he may have been an expert, knew nothing of it. 
For twenty-three centuries that ignorance of the 
learned world has continued, notwithstanding the 
immense advances in astronomical knowledge and 
in the improvement of the instruments of the ob- 
servatory. Yet all the while the mysterious and 
unknown cycle lay embedded in the symbolic 



202 My Note-Book. 

prophecies in actual use by the Hebrew seer. How 
happened that? Not one only but a system of 
co-ordinate cycles was made the groundwork of 
prophetic computations. How came that about ? 

21. The theory of the discoverer is, that a fore- 
ordained synchronism exists between the move- 
ments of the solar system and the developments 
of human history. The chronologies of the two 
are one. The mind which contrived the one fore- 
ordained the other. The clock-work of the mate- 
rial heavens and the clock-work of the history of 
Man have been created and wound up by the 
same Being. So reasons the devout astronomer. 
Of course, none but proficients in astronomical 
researches who are also proficients in the interpre- 
tation of symbolic prophecy can pronounce inde- 
pendently upon the value of the alleged discoveries. 
But the conditions attending their announcement 
entitle them to the consideration of Biblical schol- 
ars. They place the hallowed books of our religion 
in very interesting relations to human science. 

22. A question concerning our Divine revela- 
tion which has been asked through all Christian 
ages is, Why, in revealing to us so much, has it 
revealed so little ? Why is its impenetrable silence 
on many things of which the human mind has 
intense cravings after knowledge ? 

23. If the earth had no atmosphere, sound could 
not be audible anywhere on its surface. Beings 
adjusted to organic life under such conditions 
might exist here, but speech would be a lost art. 



Our Sacred Books. 203 

The whole globe would be engulfed in a silence as 
profound as if the ocean of air at the bottom of 
which we live were an ocean of water. This 
would be a world of deaf-mutes. 

Like such a world often appears the state we 
live in, of comparative ignorance of another life, 
and under an absolute embargo upon intercourse 
with our brethren of the stars. Who of us has 
not asked of the heavens on a starry night : " Why 
is this universe so silent?" Who has not longed 
to hear the legendary " music of the spheres " ? 
Why, even in our sacred books, has God revealed 
so little ? An invisible God we can see the neces- 
sity of, in the nature of things ; but a speechless 
Deity, with lips close shut to the majority of our 
questionings — who can solve this mystery ? 

24. Yet some reasons we can see for God's 
silence, especially in a revelation by a book. For 
instance, it hardly needs saying that the Bible is 
silent upon many things because they are not 
essential to its religious purposes. We are content 
with other literature if it is true to its object. 
That a poem is no more than a poem, a history 
nothing else than a history, a drama no other than 
a drama, we do not reckon as defects in their 
construction. By the same test we estimate the 
Scriptures. It is no fault in a revelation that 
it does not disclose undiscovered sciences, or the 
histories of other worlds. That Moses knew noth- 
ing of the telephone is no blemish in the Book 
of Genesis. That St. John did not discover from 



204 My Note-Book. 

Patmos the belts of Saturn is no defect in the 
Apocalypse. 

25. This principle of fitness to its aim rules out 
of the Bible the greater part of the sum of human 
knowledge. That it is a Bible, and not an ency- 
clopedia, is its first excellence. One of the 
renowned encyclopedias of Europe contains two 
hundred and twenty quarto volumes. A single 
Chinese work extends to five hundred volumes. 
For a revelation from God we need not an alcove 
of volumes like these, but a book which will give 
us the maximum of substance in the minimum of 
bulk. We need a portable book. We need a book 
which a child can read and revere as a mother's 
keepsake. We need a volume which will not 
weary by its immensity the eye of the aged or the 
ear of the dying. 

26. The Scriptures are silent upon many things, 
also, because they are only matters of curiosity 
or of marvel. We reasonably expect a revelation 
from God to commend itself to our respect by the 
dignity of its themes. Even its treatment of 
necessities would suffer in our esteem if it came to 
us fringed with frivolities and kickshaws. Our 
libraries contain volumes of the " Curiosities of 
Literature." A revelation from God ought not to 
be of those. Would the way to Heaven be more 
clear or alluring if its discovery came to us bound 
up with Dr. Kane's researches in the Arctic Sea ? 
The Scriptures have not disclosed to us the locality 
of Heaven ; but they do what is infinitely more to 



Our Sacred Boohs. 205 

the purpose. They disclose that there is a Heaven, 
and the spiritual highway to it. Philosophers 
have racked their wisdom over the origin of sin, 
the possibility of a fall from holiness, and the 
probable fortune of the race if it had not fallen. 
The Bible by its reticence discourages such in- 
quiries, but it does more than to answer them, in 
assuring us that the race has fallen, and how it 
can be uplifted from its ruins. 

27. A youthful Bible class once debated the ques- 
tion : " What is the rank in the Heavenly life of 
the world's great men ? Alexander, Caesar, Shake- 
speare, Washington — where are they now, and 
what?" The Book wisely refrains from touching 
distinctions which have no reference to its one 
great intent, — to teach what all men must do to be 
saved. A man of scientific tastes once said that 
the first question he would ask on entering Heaven 
would be : " Where is Sir Isaac Newton ? " A boy 
in a Sunday-school at the " Five Points " in New 
York said that the man whom he wanted to see 
first there was " Goliath ! " Each one to his taste ! 
But why should the Bible satisfy the curiosity of 
one of these explorers of the hidden life rather 
than that of the other? 

28. The Word of God is silent upon many 
things because they are not timely to this initial 
and preparatory stage of human development. 
The advances of human knowledge in this world 
show the forecast of an overruling Mind in the 
fact that knowledges come to the front when they 



206 My Note-Booh. 

are needed. Timeliness is a grand factor in the 
history of inventions and discoveries. Historians 
see a foreordained coincidence between the discov- 
ery of America and the state of the nations when 
the discovery was made. One-third of the globe 
was hidden from the eye of civilized man till it 
was needed for the progress of arts and sciences 
and civil freedom. 

So it was with various other inventions and dis- 
coveries of which mention has been made else- 
where. The statesman of our Civil War remarked 
the good fortune of the Union in the discovery of 
the oil wells of Pennsylvania when we needed a 
new product for exchange with Europe to take the 
place of blockaded cotton. 

On the minutest, as well as the grandest, scale 
of affairs, wise men observe the recurrence of the 
proverbial " nick of time " in the progressions of 
human knowledge. Two angels of observation 
hover over this world on poised wings. The angel 
of demand and the angel of supply keep watch, 
the one over the world's necessities, and the other 
over the resources of genius and the junctures of 
auxiliary circumstance. Each keeps time with the 
other with the fidelity of clock-work. 

29. We venture to believe, therefore, that a sim- 
ilar law of timeliness governs the higher advances 
of knowledge which arch over the two worlds of 
sense and spirit. Some knowledges are timely to 
this world, and others to that. Some discoveries 
fit a state of probation, others a state of moral 



Our Sacred Books. 207 

repose. Some are congenial with a world of sense, 
others not even intelligible except to disembodied 
mind. Some are pertinent to the infancy and some 
to the maturity of an endless life. 

All analogies suggest that in that upper stratum 
of interests, as in this of mundane affairs, this fac- 
tor of timeliness could not be ignored without 
damage. The neglect of it might involve eternal 
loss. The conditions of this world and those of 
the next it may not be safe to interchange. That 
might be like transposing the conditions of this 
globe, which has water and an atmosphere, with 
those of its satellite, which has neither. Reserve 
of knowledge till the ripening of conditions is one 
of the signal features of God's wisdom. The 
future ages of our immortality may have great 
epochs of discovery. Then we may learn the 
secret blessing of our profoundest ignorance here 
of things for which the time has not yet come. 

30. God's realm of reserve is large, and dense 
with mysteries. Who can say that He does not 
hold in wise concealment there, for the reason here 
given, the mystery of the origin of sin, and of the 
necessity of endless retributive penalties in the gov- 
ernment of the universe ? The world is no nearer 
to-day to a solution of these problems than it was 
when the patriarch, perhaps four thousand years 
ago, inquired of the silent heavens of Arabia : 
" Wherefore do the wicked live ? " But the time 
may come in the progress of the future life when 
responses to inquiry on these and kindred subjects 



208 My Note-Book. 

will be the natural and inevitable discoveries of 
the age. We may then seem to ourselves to solve 
these mysteries intuitively. We may discover 
that previous lines of history and of research have 
all been converging to that fulness of times. It 
may then appear that to have antedated those re- 
sponses by throwing them back into a life of com- 
parative infancy would have wrought irreparable 
damage. 

31. The first life in a series of endless progres- 
sions must be like no other in its inexperievice. 
Inexperience, even aside from probationary contin- 
gencies, is itself peril. In such a life, reserve of 
knowledge in some things is as much a protection 
as a revelation of it in other things. We read of 
a traveller who once crossed a bridge over a raging 
torrent in darkness so absolute that his eyes, shut 
or open, made no difference. The morning revealed 
that the bridge had been entirely swept away except 
the single timber on which he had crossed the 
rapids. If he had known the danger, his trepida- 
tion of nerve would have cost him his life. Similar 
to this may be our ignorance as a factor in the pro- 
tection of our inexperience. Knowledge of all that 
we crave to know might lay a burden of astound- 
ing truths greater than they could bear upon minds 
unbalanced and sensibilities distempered by sin. 
To fire the world with controversy over such reve- 
lations might result in moral convulsions. " Are 
ye able to be baptized with the baptism that I am 
baptized with ? Ye know not what ye ask." 



Our Sacred Books. 209 

32. We know, for example, that beings whose 
moral nature is re-enforced by the tonic disclosures 
of a redeemed life do bear, without a quiver of an 
eyelid, the sight of the symbol of endless pains 
from a world of incorrigible guilt. But who dares 
to say that he could now bear the same vision with 
the same equipoise of faith ? To us it might be 
as if we were caught up in the twinkling of an 
eye into the upper layers of the atmosphere in 
which aeronauts soar with laboring breath and 
bursting blood-vessels on the verge of asphyxia. 

The analogies of this world lead us to believe 
that through the unending succession of discov- 
eries of God which lie before us we shall find, as 
we do here, the constant recurrence of the critical 
" nick of time." We shall be told what, and when, 
and where, it will be safe for us to know. 

33. A profound hint of the Divine policy in reve- 
lation is given in a fragment of Old Testament 
biography. The disclosures made to Moses in the 
mount seem to have stimulated his desire to know 
more. He craved to look with unveiled eye upon 
the glory of Jehovah. Mark the answer to his 
prayer : " I will put thee in the cleft in the rock ; 
I will cover thee with My hand while I pass by." 
It appears, then, that converse of the finite with 
the infinite mind involves peril to finite faculties. 
There are truths which no man in this world can 
know and live. 

34. A protective element, therefore, runs through 
the Divine economy of revelation. Our ignorance 



210 My Note-Booh. 

here is the " cleft in the rock." The thoughtful 
kindness of God hides us from revelations which 
would be untimely to our conditions. But for 
this, our growth in character might be convulsive 
and catastrophic in its working. We exult in the 
dignity of knowledge. We make it the synonym 
of power. But in moral surroundings which make 
knowledge unseasonable, the blessing of ignorance 
is incalculably greater. 

35. Scientists believe that they see evidences of 
a typical relationship between this material world 
and the moral world of whose redemption it is the 
theatre. The elemental forces of the one are 
symbols of corresponding elements in the other. 
What, then, are the moral developments of which 
earthquakes and volcanoes are symbolic ? To dis- 
close them to us before the fulness of time might 
make the whole head sick and the whole heart 
faint. It might work out a ruin of human facul- 
ties more irreparable than the fall of Eden. A 
ruin it might be of which insanity is but a feeble 
premonition. That moral repose which is requisite 
to healthy growth in likeness to God is of more 
worth than intellectual visions. 

36. The Book is silent also upon some things 
because reason either certifies them, or makes them 
immensely probable. When our Lord was about to 
part with His disciples, He was thoughtful of their 
infantine faith. He saw that they were struggling 
with destiny as the rest of us do in times of be- 
reavement. They were brooding over the mys- 



Our Sacred Books, 211 

teries which death suggests but never solves. 
Where was He going? Would He be beyond 
their hearing? Should they see His face again? 
Would He come back to them a conqueror and a 
prince ? Or would His voice die in impenetrable 
silence, like those other men of mystery ? What, 
where, how far away, under what conditions, was 
that unseen world of which their inspired books 
spoke as the " land of darkness " ? 

To ease their minds, He says to them : " Do not 
trouble about such things. My Father's dwelling- 
place is large and hospitable. I go to prepare a 
home for you. My home shall be yours. If it 
were not so, Iivould have told you^ May not many 
of our unanswered questions be determined in the 
same way? Some things which we wish to believe, 
and dare not, are as certain as such things can be. 
Why should we ask for more ? 

37. For instance, are we morally free, or are we 
bondmen in sin, doomed helplessly to suffer for a 
heritage of guilt? The Scriptures do not affirm 
or deny. But surely something within us settles 
that. Dr. Johnson gave the argument in a nut- 
shell : " A man knows it, sir, and that is the whole 
of it." And can we not hear the Master say : " If 
it were not so, I would have told you " ? Shall we 
recognize friends in heaven? Nature unhesitat- 
ingly responds : Why not ? And does not our 
Lord seem to add : " If it were not so, I would 
have told you " ? Are infants saved who die 
before infantile character is set in changeless 



212 My Note-Booh. 

groove ? Undoubtedly. The common sense of 
men determines that. And from God's Word do 
we not hear the echo : " If it were not so, I would 
have told you " ? 

A volume might be compiled of inquiries like 
these which carry their answers in the asking. In 
the material world, God never does needless things. 
Not a leaf opens in the springtime which is not 
worth a life. Much more in a supernatural rev- 
elation should there be no wasted wisdom. That 
which the skies, and the seas, and the forests, and 
the prairies are forever chanting in our ears in 
majestic cadence, we should not ask prophets to 
teach us, or martyrs to witness to us. 

38. Our holy books do not once prove to us the 
Being of God. Yet faith knows no more necessary 
truth. Why were not the archives of the universe 
ransacked for indubitable evidences ? Atheism 
would so easily have been struck dumb forever. 
We might fancy that angels would have come 
trooping to earth to assure us- But when they do 
come and look over the shoulder of him who is 
elected to record for us a revelation from God, 
His Being is never once named as a subject of dia- 
lectic discourse. Why ? Because no man can in 
reason doubt it. Nature settles it to every honest 
and balanced mind. A man who doubts or denies 
it is usually credulous to the verge of dotage 
respecting things immensely less probable. He is 
a moral Nyctalops who is blind at midday, and has 
the eye of an eagle at midnight. 



Our Sacred Boohs. 213 

God trusts the evidences of His own existence 
to the necessities of men. Lord Bacon spoke the 
voice of the ages when he said : " I would rather 
believe all the fables in the Koran, than that this 
world has no God." The learned world goes on 
piling up libraries of proof and disproof, and reply 
and rejoinder, respecting the First Cause. Mean- 
while the Spirit of the Book is looking calmly on, 
and saying never a word. His silence means more 
than speech. It means : " If doubt of God's Being 
were in reason, think you that I would not have 
told you how to solve it ? " 

39. Our Divine books are taciturn about some 
things because ignorance of them is a more valu- 
able factor than knowledge would be in probation- 
ary discipline. Trial of character is largely by 
trial of faith. To lessen the discipline makes less 
of the man in its result. Therefore inspiration 
often does not follow the lead of our inquiries. 
Inspiration looks up and looks off when we look 
down. Then, again, the seer looks down to some- 
thing of practical use or of pressing urgency, while 
we are looking away to the nebulae. It says : "Why 
stand ye gazing up into Heaven?" Even revela- 
tions which would add something to our stock of 
thought are witheld, because fidelity without them 
would add more to our stock of character. All 
the answer we get is : " Blessed are those who 
have not seen, and yet have believed." 

40. This principle explains, in part, the awful 
stillness of our Sacred Scriptures respecting the 



214 My Note-Book. 

dead. Suppose that all the questionings of our 
grief were answered. What would be the se- 
quence? Our fancy would gather our lost ones 
around us in loving groups. We should live in a 
Christian fairyland. We should set plates for them 
on our dining-tables as some of the disciples of the 
Swedish Seer are said to do. Such a life could 
not be much more valuable for spiritual discipline, 
than the Hall of Valhalla. The fictitious element 
would lord it over the true. Our bereaved life 
would be the old life reproduced and idealized, 
but without mundane realities to steady it in good 
sense. Where would room be found for Christ ? 
Romish history teaches us how perilous it would 
be for us to know much about departed saints. 

41. One loss especially should we suffer if our 
Bible satisfied all the cravings of affliction. We 
should lose the tonic reaction of the finality which 
death gives to probationary experience. It is a 
grand thing for us, that in so many ways death 
fixes a limit to earthly interests and ambitions. 
Never a death occurs which does not cut short some 
lines of earthly allurement to survivors. Some one 
of the three Sisters of Destiny severs a strand 
which binds us too closely to this world. This is 
well. It helps to concentrate our thought on 
things more vital to the felicitous settlement of 
our destiny. We are kept from a great deal 
of spiritual gossip by the silence of the Bible con- 
cerning departed souls. The vacuity of our igno- 
rance throws us back in more docile mood upon 



Our Sacred Books, 215 

the lessons which Gocl has had in mind in their 
removal. 

42. The silence of our sacred books about the 
interior of the spiritual world is in keeping with 
the methods in which the most profound teachings 
of the Spirit are imparted to us. These are com- 
monly given in still ways. They come in still 
hours, in whispers, in hints, in queries, to which 
our own souls give answer. They are not heralded 
by blare of trumpet and beat of drum. It would 
not take much out of the common way to deafen 
our ears to their gentle tones. The staring marvel 
with which we should pore over a volume full of 
revelations about the dead would not be helpful 
to that calm, steady vigilance which is requisite to 
our discovery of the deep things of God. 

43. Such a volume would not be much better 
than a world in which visible apparitions should 
flit to and fro, here and there and everywhere, 
interrupting us by day and scaring us by night. 
History abounds with these, of one sort and an- 
other. They come with just evidence enough of 
the fact to keep us all agog with expectations 
which they never realize. TTe have libraries, too, 
made up of messages from oracular spirits, who 
know less than they knew here. They make the 
world they live in insufferably repulsive by their 
want of dignity and good sense. Stuff more bar- 
ren of useful discovery never found its way into 
print than that which makes up the literature of 
magic. 



216 My Note-Book. 

Suppose, then, that our supernatural books con- 
tained records enough of correspondence between 
the living and the dead to create a plausible 
groundwork for necromantic oracles. What reason 
have we to believe* that we should make anything 
better out of them than we have made out of nec- 
romantic revelations which have kept the world 
agape through all past times ? What a mass 
of addled theology would have accumulated by 
this time ! Good Lord deliver us ! Yet how 
fascinating it would be to people in affliction ! 
Have not the best of us been sometimes tempted 
to seek out "the woman that had a familiar 
spirit"? 

44. The silence of the Bible, it should be borne 
in mind, disturbs us chiefly under the discipline of 
bereavement. It should go far to quiet us, that 
it is a part of that discipline. The thing which 
afflicts us most severely is that our "loved and 
lost " have gone into a land of silence. Oblivion 
shuts them out from us, and us from them. The 
pressure of a finger on the medulla oblongata of 
the human brain produces instant loss of mem- 
ory. We sometimes tremble at the thought that 
perhaps the removal of souls from the physical 
organ of thought produces the same effect on their 
memory. The land of silence is to them literally 
the land of forgetfulness. We call to them, and 
they do not answer. At times we cannot realize 
to our thought that they are not under the sod 
with which we have covered them, or in the tomb 






Our Sacred Books. 217 

where we have with our own hand shut the iron 
door upon them. 

Yet it is better for us that we are as we are. It 
drives us back into the clouds and darkness where 
God is. It helps us to make real to our faith the 
resurrection of our Lord. Heaven becomes a 
reality to us, as it could not in any other way. 
We are wiser for it, if, with faces buried in a 
prophet's mantle, we listen only for the whispers 
of His love. Often, probably, our friends are 
removed for the very purpose of creating a void 
which only God can fill. Their voices are rever- 
ently silent, — perhaps consciously and intention- 
ally silent, — that we may the better hear God 
speak. It is timely to such a life as this that it 
should be so. The renewal of earthly friendships 
may be most wisely reserved for a world where 
God so fills all thought that it can inflict no dan- 
ger of moral damage. 

45. Our Testaments, Old and New, are silent 
about some things, because their spiritual nature 
renders them inconceivable in our present envelop- 
ment of bodily sense. Certain spiritual disclosures 
would be of no more use to us than the painting 
of a sea-storm to the blind. We have no faculties 
competent to take in such revelations. We could 
not interpret the language in which they must be 
expressed if expressed at all. Doubtless many 
things are untold because they can be told only by 
symbols ; and symbolic representations of them 
would do us more harm than good. We are 



218 My Note-Book. 

bunglers in the reading of emblematic dialects. 
We stumble upon bogs, and flounder into quag- 
mires of literalism. We are apt to end with get- 
ting ourselves swamped in atheistic doubts by our 
struggles to make something out of them which 
the senses can take hold of. Nothing else is so 
prolific of false and imbecile beliefs, as the wilful 
resolve of the human mind to crowd spirit into 
sense. We make an " infinite deal of nothing " of 
it when we strive to make matter hold mind. Yet 
this is what we must do if we insist on the dis- 
closure of certain spiritual truths to minds enclosed 
in a framework of physical faculties. Densest 
ignorance is better than that. Therefore igno- 
rance it is. 

46. Incidentally to the cravings of the human 
mind for converse with the dead, its equal craving 
for knowledge of the conditions of life in Heaven, 
renders the silence of the Bible a trial to faith. 
Of few things are mankind so impatient as of 
their enforced ignorance of another life. A living 
publisher has been heard to say, that almost any 
book with the word " Heaven " on its title-page is 
sure of a successful sale. So intense is human 
desire to explore the world beyond. 

47. On the subject of the heavenly life our 
Scriptures are reticent, not silent. They make 
some things certain and others as probable as the 
majority of the facts on which we act in daily life. 
They assure us that Heaven is a place. Socrates 
was right in speaking of the " future habitation of 



Our Sacred Boohs. 219 

the soul." We cannot err essentially in conceiv- 
ing of it as existing somewhere. Heaven has a 
theocratic government. Gradation exists in its 
social order. Its occupations, so far at least as 
men conduct them, are performed by the faculties 
of a celestial body. The ills of terrestrial condi- 
tions are not there. In their place is a felicitous 
activity which nothing else can symbolize so 
accurately as exultant song. The redeemed hold 
some sort of regal and sacerdotal rank. Christ 
is their imperial Chief. Christ in glorified man- 
hood so diffuses His own presence through all 
the ramifications of heavenly society that He 
is to that world what the sun is to our solar 
system. 

Moreover, our "place" there is to be one which 
has required the personal presence and ingenuity 
of our Lord in its preparation for our coming. He 
who created and adorned this world with such 
marvellous invention is creating and adorning 
another for our final abode. It will be adapted to 
our necessities, our character, our tastes, even to 
our innocent idiosyncrasies. All that is peculiar 
to our natural individuality will be provided for. 
It will be a natural continuation, in its regnant 
spirit, to all that is pure in our life here. The 
transition from this life to that will not be revolu- 
tionary. The process of the change is like a 
natural slumber. We shall fall asleep here and 
awake there. 

48. These are specific and intelligible ideas. 



220 My Note-Book. 

They certainly add something to the far-off dreamy 
notion which some have of Heaven as only a state of 
happiness and holiness, that being all that we know 
about it. It is not all. Though expressed with 
the gorgeousness of Oriental imagery, these are 
solid facts. The resplendent painting of St. John's 
vision, or the calm, didactic assurances of our Lord, 
ought not to go for nothing, through fear that they 
may mean something. They do mean something. 
We abuse a revelation from Heaven if we conjure 
all significance out of its symbolic teachings be- 
cause they are symbols. Human speech chooses 
the symbolic form because it means so much ; not 
to throw back into a blank words that mean noth- 
ing. So far as our Occidental fancy can reproduce 
the Biblical painting soberly in literal concep- 
tion, Ave are quite within the liberty of inspired 
thought in doing so. 

49. But beyond the purpose here indicated, con- 
jecture of the heavenly life is useless and may be 
worse. Reverence is apt to fare hardly at the 
hands of guess-work. Minds of healthy faith and 
Biblical training w^ill get a loftier inspiration from 
the few but striking hints which the Bible gives. 
Specially does the Biblical assurance .that the life 
there transcends all sensuous conceptions founded 
on the life here open to us an illimitable field of 
anticipation. It is a world of God's contriving. 
Therefore it is like Him in the magnitude of its 
resources. Its life is a hidden life with Christ in 
God. We wait for its disclosure till the dawn 



Our Sacred Books. 221 

of spiritual faculty shall enable us to take in spirit- 
ual glory. 

50. Our reticent Bible gives us one grand hint 
of the unseen world by a pregnant negative decla- 
ration, "Eye hath not seen and ear hath not heard." 
Although these words were not aimed primarily 
at the heavenly life, yet they include that. The 
hint they give, therefore, is that the reality is so 
much beyond and above all sensuous discovery, 
that it is useless to attempt description or painting. 
Negative definitions and descriptions are often 
most dense with meaning. We are helped in the 
discovery of what truth is by a discovery of what 
it is not. That the coming life cannot be described 
by human tongue, nor painted by human fancy, 
gives us by its bare negation a thought surpassing 
thought. God's silence means more than most 
eloquent speech. It opens to us an illimitable 
field of anticipation. Our taciturn Scriptures in- 
vite us to wait for its disclosures till the dawn of 
spiritual faculty shall enable us to take in spiritual 
glory. We rest assured that God will speak when 
and where He can speak to the purpose. 



IX. 



THE THEISTIC AND THE CHRISTIAN TYPES OF 
RELIGIOUS LIFE. 

1. Two varieties of religious experience are one 
in spirit, yet diverse in the habits of mind by which 
they disclose themselves to the consciousness of 
the believer. One is marked by the emphasis 
which it gives to the personality of God. This is 
the central idea around which all other ideas re- 
volve. The fact that there is a God, a personal 
God, a God everywhere present, efficient in the 
great forces of Nature, and revealing His govern- 
ment in the still voices of conscience, gives charac- 
ter to the whole moral being of the man. He is 
emphatically a believer in God. He is a friend of 
God, a child of God. Those peculiarities of the 
hidden life which encircle the person of Christ are 
less strongly marked, if they exist at all, in the 
distinct consciousness of the believing spirit. 

2. This theistic type of religious life gives large 
place to the exercise of adoration. The grace of 
reverence is thrifty in its growth. Prayer dwells 
much upon the attributes of God. Devotional 
feeling commonly takes the form of fear of God, 
trust in God, joy in God, desire after God, thank- 

222 



Theistic and Christian Types. 223 

fulness to God, and in its ecstatic phase of con- 
scious union with God. There is a variety of this 
type of piety in which the personal blessedness 
of God becomes a source of blessedness to the be- 
liever. A reverent sympathy with the inconceiv- 
able felicity of the Divine Being takes possession 
of His child. His filial heart is glad because God 
is full of gladness. A lowly sense of ownership 
springs up in relation to God. The phrase " My 
God" has a singular and intense significance. 
With no lapse into cant, he says in self-communion : 
" I belong to God, and God to me. I am His 
friend, and He is mine, by the ties of an immortal 
trust." This variety of godly life abounds in the 
saintly characters of the Old Testament. It is re- 
produced in later times in those godly men and 
women whose meditations dwell chiefly upon the 
examples of the more ancient Scriptures. 

3. Some of our hymns of adoration addressed 
to the First Person of the Godhead have been 
hallowed by the voice and the heart of ages. To 
us they often appear too intense for honest wor- 
ship. We resign them to professional choirs and 
quartets. We admire them as works of art. We 
are apt to think of them as the honest offerings of 
saints and the dying words of martyrs only. 

There is a hymn which in its Latin original is 
probably nearly a thousand years old, beginning, 
M Thee we adore, Eternal God " ; and another of 
Roman Catholic origin, " My God, how wonderful 
Thou art ! " and a dozen versions of the twenty- 



224 My Note-Book. 

third Psalm, one of which, an ancient version by 
Ains worth, was a favorite with the New England 
Pilgrims, and is more likely than any other to have 
been sung by them on that Lord's Day which they 
spent on Clark's Island before landing from Ply- 
mouth harbor, beginning with, " Jehovah feedeth 
me ; I shall not lack " ; and Luther's hymn, sung 
at his fourth centennial by forty thousand voices 
at Eisleben and echoed around the world, " God 
is my Refuge, ever near " ; and the old battle-song 
of Gustavus Adolphus, sung by his army at Liitzen, 
and again by the army of Oliver Cromwell at 
Naseby, " Fear not, O little flock, the foe ! " 

These exultant hymns of praise and trust and 
love and courage, we, in these luxurious times, 
may well hesitate to sing, lest we take God's name 
in vain by melodramatic worship. Yet this por- 
tion of our Hymnology is none too exalted to ex- 
press the aspirations of a believer in whose culture 
this type of experience has ripened. The existence 
of such hymns is evidence that it has been lived 
by holy men in all ages. 

4. This species of faith often gives a peculiar 
phase to the consciousness of sin. Sin, as reflected 
from this mirror, towers up into a flagrant and 
defiant wrong inflicted on God. Probably in noth- 
ing else does the human mind realize to its thought 
the personality of God so vividly as in suffering 
the mordant stings of conscience. Remorse is the 
revenge which angered Law takes when sin is felt 
to be an outrage upon a personal Deity. Law im- 



Theistic and Christian Types, 225 

personal is scarcely more to us than any other dead 
thing. It is God, the infinite and infinitely holy 
Person, against whom sin is flung in insult. That 
which was but error at the first deepens into crime 
against the rights of God. Not Law, but the Law- 
giver, is the only Being in the universe with whom 
a guilty conscience has to do. The unanswered 
question of the ages, " How shall man be just with 
God ? " looms up as the only question in the uni- 
verse which needs an answer. The world's peace 
hangs upon it. 

5. To one in whom this variety of religious cul- 
ture has become a life the works of nature are 
profoundly significant as religious symbols. Sir 
Fowell Buxton says : " A man must preach very 
well indeed before he conveys such a lesson of the 
greatness of God and the unworthiness of man, 
as a view of the heavens discloses." Richter de- 
scribes a dream in which the sleeper sees an angel 
" bearing a mortal man through the endless choirs 
and galaxies of immensity till he trembles and cries 
out at the overpowering spectacle of God's infini- 
tude." 

Such is the involuntary response of all thoughtful 
and believing minds to the resources of awakened 
worship which the material universe discloses. 
They are vocal with revelations of God. From a 
leaflet of a geranium to the fixed stars, and the 
awful possibilities of spaces which no star illu- 
mines, everything that is, to a vigilant soul is articu- 
late of God. To such believing spirits there is no 



226 My Note-Booh. 

cant in the " worship of Nature's Temple." It is 
as real as St. John's vision of the New Jerusalem. 

6. The type of religious life now under review 
spurns as an absurdity the solicitude of a certain 
class of literary men and scientists to evade the 
recognition of a personal Creator. The effort to 
expurgate the very name of God from literary and 
scientific vocabularies is often offensive. Only 
one phenomenon of modern literature is more illog- 
ical. That is the sober and labored attempt of 
Matthew Arnold to expunge the idea of a personal 
Deity from the religion of the Hebrews. 

Even if science must, in some connections, be 
reticent in its nomenclature, what has literature 
to do with such diplomatic evasions ? Why, for 
instance, should Emerson, with his Platonic tastes 
and spiritual aspirations, find it so difficult to say 
outright the Holy Name ? The facts in his thought 
are sometimes too urgent for his reserve. He 
must say something to indicate the unseen Power 
which no earnest seeker after truth can do with- 
out. Why, then, must he beat about the bush, and 
say " Nature," "Law," "Fate," "the Gods," "the 
Stars," "the Absolute," "the All," "the Over- 
soul," "Jupiter," "Thor," " Woden " — anything 
but GOD ? Why should that stick in his throat ? 
When the personal Name does force its way 
through the philosophic dead-lock into plain 
speech, why does it come as if he blushed for it ? 

7. It is refreshing to turn from baptized heathen- 
ism to the athletic faith of such a mind as Nie- 



Theistic and Christian Types. 227 

buhr's, to whom Nature and Nature's God were 
one ; or to the faith, more profound than science, 
expressed in Coleridge's " Hymn before Sunrise in 
the Vale of Chamouni " ; or to that beautiful trib- 
ute to the unity of science and religion which 
Louis Agassiz paid in opening the sessions of 
his class in Biology on the Island of Penikese : 
"Young gentlemen, before we commence to look 
into the secrets of Nature, let us seek wisdom from 
the God of Nature ! Let us pray ! " 

8. The theistic type of religious culture, in its 
best development, may not inaptly be denominated 
the religion of literature. When a religious spirit 
breathes at all in secular literature, why does it so 
commonly assume this theistic form? Is it that 
modern letters owe so much to those of Greece 
and Rome in which Christ was unknown? Ac- 
count for it as we may, the fact is indisputable 
that the vital piety expressed or implied in the 
major part of our secular libraries is that which 
we term natural, as distinct from revealed, religion. 
The theology of poets, of essayists, of dramatists, 
of philosophers, of historians, is for the most part 
natural as distinguished from Christian theology. 

9. Wordsworth's " Excursion," for example, is 
one of the most religious poems in the language. 
But its religious thought is derived chiefly from 
the Book of Nature, not from the Christian Script- 
ures. Emerson once said that Wordsworth's " Ode 
to Immortality " is the most decisive argument for 
the truth of that doctrine extant in our literature. 



228 My Note-Book. 

Yet not a line of it is necessarily and directly attrib- 
utable to the Bible. Bryant's " Thanatopsis " has 
been characterized as being rather a heathen than 
a Christian poem. The theology of Shakespeare, 
though expressed as he could not have expressed 
it but for the atmosphere of Christian culture in 
which his mind was formed, yet is inspired by the 
material world and the intuitions of conscience 
more distinctly than by the Christian revelation. 
Spenser's " Fairy Queen " and Milton's " Paradise 
Lost " are the only two poems of equal eminence 
in our language, which are constructed, warp and 
woof, on Christian ideas, and with direct use of 
Biblical materials. 

Although it is true that English Literature, as a 
whole, is more thoroughly imbued with the spirit 
of the Bible than any other now existing, yet the 
facts above named indicate the limited extent to 
which our religion as a spiritual life in the soul of 
the individual has taken possession of the leading 
minds of those who have made our literature what 
it is. Their faith in Christianity has been largely 
nominal. It has been belief as distinct from faith. 

10. More generally than we should be glad to 
find it, this religion of Nature is the variety of 
religious life expressed by American statesmen. 
AVhat has their confession of faith often given to 
the world more positive than that of the best 
heathen philosophers ? Thomas Jefferson pro- 
fessed in private his sympathy with the liturgic 
service of the Church of England. But so far as 



Theistic and Christian Types. 229 

an observer of his life could have discovered, his 
personal faith, that which represented his men- 
tal history, was scarcely more than that of Cic- 
ero. The same is true of many of his associates in 
the first American Congress. Benjamin Franklin, 
though trained in the ancient faith of New Eng- 
land, when he came at the last to declare his 
mature opinions, had not so much to declare 
which was indicative of a spiritual life as Plato 
had. 

American statesmen sometimes betray a timid- 
ity, unworthy of their ancestry, in their straining 
to avoid religious cant. This infirmity has ren- 
dered their religious utterances on the approach of 
death jejune and commonplace. Their guarded 
words in some cases have been as bare of distinc- 
tively Christian aspirations as the symbolic inscrip- 
tions on the pyramids. The dying words of one 
of the most illustrious of them amount to scarcely 
more than this — that, all things considered, 
Christianity is a credible system of belief, and on 
the whole the Bible is a good book. There is one 
thing more discreditable to a man of Christian 
birth than the cant of Christianity ; it is the cant 
of heathenism. 

11. A striking illustration of the tendency of 
a theistic religion to lapse into a nominal belief 
is found in the life of one of the statesman of 
England in the last generation. He was contem- 
porary with the Rev. William Jay of Bath. Mr. 
Jay was one of the most intelligible preachers of 



230 My Note-Book. 

his times. Unlettered hearers listened to him in 
silent crowds. Children easily took in his mean- 
ing. He possessed that first and best sign of a 
great preacher, that men were moved by his dis- 
courses without distinction of intellectual or of 
social class. 

Yet when " the great commoner " heard one of Mr. 
Jay's plain sermons addressed to spiritual believers, 
he said at the close of the services, that he had not 
received one definite idea of the preacher's mean- 
ing. Such a result might be due to defects in 
the discourse of many another preacher, but not 
to defects in that of Mr. Jay. What, then, was 
the root of the difficulty ? It was simply that the 
mental habits of the statesman were so void of the 
ideas peculiar to a spiritual Christianity that he 
could not interpret the dialect in which they were 
uttered. It was a strange tongue to him, because 
the ideas which it carried were strange to his 
experience. He had never lived anything which 
lifted his mind to their level. 

12. The theistic variety of religious experience 
when it is a real life in a believing soul may as 
honestly express a regenerate state as the more 
characteristic life of a Christian believer. It may 
have been " saving faith " to many a heathen 
inquirer after truth. To Marcus Aurelius it may 
have been such. The practicability of salvation 
through this imperfect knowledge of the true God 
is distinctly recognized by St. Paul. " Eternal 
Power and Godhead " are the things which may be 



Theistic and Christian Types. 231 

M clearly seen, being understood by the things that 
are made." God may have disclosed Himself thus, 
to how many we cannot know. They saw more, 
and saw more clearly it may be, than we have been 
wont to give credit for to the system of things 
under which they lived. What they saw was 
golden truth, so far as it went. It may have been 
the motor to a penitent and believing life. 

We may therefore find Socrates in rank with 
Christian martyrs. The " Meditations " of Aure- 
lius are a phenomenon most significant and hope- 
ful respecting the probable range of the human 
mind and the efficiency of the human conscience 
in the discovery of the most necessary ideas with- 
out the aid of a revelation. It should not astonish 
us if we see many from the West and from the 
East in the kingdom from which its children have 
been cast out. 

13. In modern Christian communities are found 
many good men who are not churchmen. One 
who is predisposed to judge men generously would 
fain discover in many such men the unconscious 
disciples of Christ. They live in a Christian 
twilight. Prejudices often curtail the volume of 
their faith. Their sacred books are abridged. 
They may see as cross-eyed men see, not in perfect 
perspective. As they see, so they believe often in 
fragments. But cross-eyed men do see something. 
An abridged Bible may contain much saving truth. 
Isaac Taylor has observed that if the entire Script- 
ures were blotted out from the literatures of the 



232 My Note-Book. 

world except the briefest of St. Paul's Epistles, the 
residuum of Christian truth would be sufficient to 
save the world. One truth, living as a faith, in 
the character of one believer carries with it a 
thousand corollaries. 

So in the case of infirm believers, the Spirit of 
God may use their contracted and tangled faith in 
a fragmentary revelation to their eternal life. In 
His magnanimous vision of their character they 
may be devout men, worshippers in secret of One 
who sees in secret. Their feeble cousciousness of 
a living God may one day grow into an over- 
powering consciousness of a living Christ. The 
kingdom of Heaven is as a grain of mustard 
seed. 

14. Unconscious conversion is probably a more 
common occurrence in the economy of grace than 
we think. The Holy Spirit achieves many secret 
conquests. He employs all varieties of method 
and all proportions and some disproportions of 
truth to meet all diversities of condition. As men 
judge, He saves at great risks. The ways to 
Heaven are many, not identical, but convergent. 

15. Opposite, yet not contrary to the variety of 
religious life described in the foregoing pages, is 
another which is illustrated in the large majority 
of believers. It differs from the theistic type of 
piety in the fact that the central and regnant idea 
around which it circles is Christ. Not the idea of 
God in the undivided unity of His being, but the 
idea of God incarnate in the person of His Son, 



Theistic and Christian Types. 233 

gives character to the whole round of the believer's 
faith. This is made familiar to us by the large 
majority of Christian biographies. The inner life 
which they portray is Christian as distinct from 
theistic. It is the Christian religion of the New 
Testament, not the natural religion of the Old. 

16. This emphatically Christian type of piety is 
marked in its most mature examples by an inten- 
sity all its own. Christian memoirs abound with 
narratives in which the person and the atoning 
work of Christ appear to have been absolutely reg- 
nant in the believer's religious life. Often on the 
approach of death the very name of Jesus has had 
power to call back the dying memory from the 
land of shadows. An example of this was wit- 
nessed in the extreme old age of one of our fathers 
in the ministry, recently deceased. When his 
memory had become infirm, he used at times to 
imagine in social prayer that he was conversing 
with friends long ago departed, and whom he was 
soon to follow. 

On one such occasion, he talked with a ministe- 
rial brother whose death had greatly afflicted him. 
When his mind righted itself, he prayed : " O Lord, 
my memory is gone, but Thou knowest that I have 
not forgotten Jesus Christ." 

17. The soul's immortality has no more impres- 
sive proof than such a phenomenon as this. What 
is that something on which a name can be so inde- 
structibly engraved that it cannot die ? Agnostic 
science is very wise, but what cerebral convo- 



234 My Note-Book. 

lutions can explain this? What impersonal psy- 
chic force achieves the mystery ? 

18. In countries in which religious expression 
is more demonstrative than in ours, this type of 
piety is found beautifully wrought into social 
usages. " The Lord is risen" was the morning sal- 
utation of the early Christians. The Waldenses 
used to accompany their good wishes of the morn- 
ing and evening with a formula which recognized 
the intercession of our Lord. " In His Name," 
they said. That was also their password by which 
they distinguished friend from foe when they held 
their faith at the risk of their life. In some dis- 
tricts of the Tyrolese Alps, friends meeting in the 
mountain highways used to salute each other thus : 
" Praised be the Lord Christ," says the elder, and 
" Forever more, Amen ! " the younger responded. 
The national faith must have had somewhere in 
the past a most intense vitality to have given birth 
to such social customs. 

19. Another feature of this variety of Christian 
living is its intense individuality. No other vari- 
ety equals it in singleness of experience. That is 
a great revolution which comes into a believer's 
consciousness when his faith realizes to him the 
personal love of Christ to him as an individual. 
Christ as a world's redeemer, and Christ as the 
redeemer of the individual, are very distinct. Sal- 
vation as a corporate gift, or an organic arrange- 
ment for the race, and salvation as a blessing to 
the individual believer, are widely different things. 



Theistic and Christian Types. 235 

The one may live in his belief many years before 
the other becomes a reality to his faith. 

Yet it is a very simple thing when we put our 
minds to the root of the matter. The entire work 
of Christ for man is an individual concern. We 
sin as individuals. We are regenerated as indi- 
viduals. We appropriate his atoning sacrifice as 
individuals. We shall stand one day at His tribu- 
nal of judgment as individuals. In this singleness 
of relationship between the individual spirit and 
our Lord is laid the foundation of the entire work. 
On this rests every hope. The whole wealth of 
our Redeemer's love flows out to each and every 
one, as if he were the only sacred being in the uni- 
verse. He does not come into His full heirship 
with Christ, as a redeemed being, until those 
words of St. Paul become an overwhelming reality 
to Him: "Who loved me and gave Himself for 
mer 

20. In the individual life this experience is apt 
to disclose itself first as a sequence to an impas- 
sioned sense of sin. Ignoring sin, all religion 
is a by-play to real life. To the purpose of such a 
life as man lives here, it means nothing, does noth- 
ing, promises nothing, is nothing. But when the 
consciousness of sin takes such possession of a 
man's inner being that he feels it to be the one 
central fact of his moral history, then he begins to 
feel as profoundly his need of Christ. From this 
discovery the step is short and quick to that of 
the reality of Christ. It is human nature to be- 



236 My Note-Book. 

lieve vehemently in the thing we need. We sel- 
dom believe in Christ as a reality till we first find 
Him as a necessity. Other and finer relations to 
Him disclose themselves at a later stage of spirit- 
ual growth, but the initial discovery is that of a 
desperate necessity. We find Christ in the deep 
religious sense of faith, because we must find Him. 

John Foster uttered the experience of the vast 
majority of believers : " The Gospel to me is not a 
matter of speculation, but of necessity. I come to 
Jesus because I need pardon." So say we all in 
those hours of spiritual discovery in which our 
vision is most keen and our assimilation of truth 
is most active. Some can find rest from the tem- 
pestuous agitations of an angered conscience, and 
others from the dull dead ache of remorse, in no 
other way. The dull, theistic type of religious 
faith is not enough for such quickened believers. 
They must find God in Christ. 

21. Real life sometimes discloses a fearful pecu- 
liarity in that experience in which the conscious- 
ness of sin is not relieved by a spiritual discovery 
of Christ. It is that the consciously guilty one 
cannot pray. He appears to himself so remote 
from God in moral sympathy that prayer is 
mockery. Cowper once described this in his own 
diseased vagaries, as " a remoteness compared with 
which the distance from East to West is vicinity, 
is cohesion." Thrust out like Cain from the pres- 
ence of the Lord, a sinner feels that like the first 
murderer he is an accursed and branded being. 



Theistic and Christian Types. 237 

The universe must undergo some catastrophic 
revolution before prayer from his lips can traverse 
the infinite spaces which separate him from the 
place hallowed by God's dwelling. " Do not 
name prayer to me," said Voltaire in his last 
hours, as he is reported by his Christian nurse. 

22. Poets, with no intent to illustrate a Biblical 
truth, have illustrated this truth of the contradic- 
tion between prayer and the consciousness of sin 
unrelieved by the discovery of Christ. Thus 
Shakespeare pictures the remorse of Macbeth 
when the blood-stains on his hands bring his 
guilt home to him. He cannot pray. He over- 
hears the young sons of the murdered prince 
waking from their troubled sleep to say their 
prayers, and he says : — 

" Listening ... I could not say ■ Amen ' 
When they did say < God bless us ! ' 
Wherefore could I not pronounce * Amen'? 
I had most need of blessing, yet l Amen ' 
Stuck in my throat." 

This is human nature when buffeting the infu- 
riated billows of remorse without Christ. The 
most genuine literature of the world places a 
guilty man in the same dread extremity in which 
the Bible places him. Dramatic genius paints it 
as the pulpit paints it. To a guilty being aroused 
to an honest disclosure of himself, the thought 
of God is freighted with secret revenges, which 
nothing silences but a corresponding disclosure 
of Christ. Sometimes that discovery comes as a 



238 My Note-Booh. 

surprise : it did so to David Brain erd. In other 
cases it is the fruit of prolonged discipline : it was 
such to Richard Baxter. But in both it is one 
thing — a sense of the reality of Christ as God — 
working out a redemption from sin which is pos- 
sible in no other way. 

23. Another peculiarity of this phase of relig- 
ious life is that when we grasp the fact of Christ 
as a reality in our moral destiny, we have no 
desire to philosophize about it. That is to say, 
a philosophy of the atonement is not a necessity 
to our mental repose. The contradiction of trinity 
in unity in the ontology of Divine Being does not 
disturb us. Nor does the ulterior mystery of 
atonement, as related to the moral government 
of God, clamor for a clearance. Under the intoler- 
able weight of guilt we have no heart for such 
researches. They may come to us at a later stage 
of moral quietude, but for the time being we do 
not care for them. Men struggling for a necessity 
do not think beyond the necessity. A swimmer 
striking out for dear life does not care for more 
than life. So in that exigency of an awakened 
spirit in which we appropriate Christ by faith, 
philosophical speculations find no purpose. We 
hang on the edge of suspended fate. We want 
a Redeemer who is God-Man ; but to know what 
is the mysterious bond between them would be 
rather a hindrance than a help. That wisdom 
is not timely, though from the lips of angels. 

24. It deserves note also that the conscious pos- 



Theistic and Christian Types. 239 

session of Christ as a personal Saviour brings the 
believing spirit into closer proximity to a personal 
God than it seems reverent to approach when all 
that we know of Him is His unveiled Deity. 

The confessions of a pastor's note-book often 
give illustrations of this. A pastor in Boston 
once mentioned to me an inquirer in his own par- 
ish whose awe at the ineffable majesty of God was 
so profound that he had no consciousness of the 
filial relationship between God and himself. The 
possibility of it was a discovery. He might fear 
God, revere God, repent towards God, trust God, 
adore God, obey God ; but he said : " Do you mean 
to say that I am free to love God as I do a personal 
friend?" 

25. Overpowering awe at the majesty and holi- 
ness of God is not limited to minds of exceptional 
structure. This is evident from the fact that it 
finds so frequent and intense expression in our 
Hymnology. One recalls at random such lines as 
the following ; viz. : — 

" Great God, and wilt thou condescend 

To cast a look below? " 
M And can this mighty King 

Of glory condescend ? " 
" My God ! O could I make the claim, 

My Father and my Friend ! " 
" Father ! if I may call Thee so." 

In such strains of trembling reverence the 
Church has for ages been wont to sing that mood 
of devotional feeling in which the remoteness of 



240 My Note-Book. 

a holy God from a guilty man burdens the spirit. 
But that mood gives way to a sense of proximity 
and of friendship when God is discovered as a 
reality in the person of our Lord. Christian 
Hymnology in every language overflows with 
hymns of loving adoration of Christ. 

26. An affecting illustration of the unsatisfied 
craving of a believing heart for union with God is 
on record in the Memoirs of Dr. Chalmers. The 
strength of his character gives it a place among 
the few records of Christian experience which the 
Church will not "willingly let die." 

Under one date he writes in a diary kept for his 
own eye alone: "March 4. Cannot say much of 
my walk with God." Again he says, " March 5. 
Cannot yet record a close walk with God." Then, 
"March 7. Cannot yet speak of any walk with 
God." And again, " March 8. Not yet ! Not yet! 
O God, help me ! " And once more, " March 9. 
Not yet ! O my God, keep me humble ! " At last 
he records in one of those silent communings with 
himself and God, these words : " Will not a quiet 
confidence in Christ bring it about?" The words 
of this confession of a good, great man are few, and 
of the more worth for being few. A volume of 
unwritten biography lies behind them. Here is a 
godly man who, after years of Christian discipline, 
labors day after day under the same sense of the 
infinite recoil of the sensibilities of God from human 
guilt which is felt by the humblest believer. At the 
very time when Europe and America were ringing 



Theistic and Christian Types. 241 

with admiration of his genius, and when vast 
assemblies crowded the largest church in Scotland, 
and extended from the windows and doors across 
the street, to catch the words that fell from his 
lips, this struggle of his inner life was going on 
in secret. None but himself and God knew it. 
He could find God in the walk of friend with 
Friend, only as the rest of us do, by " a quiet con- 
fidence in Christ.'' 

27. A remarkable difference exists between the 
Protestant and the Romish faith in their impression 
upon religious life, of the person of the Redeemer. 
Protestant faith realizes to the believer's thought a 
living Christ ; Romish faith, a dead Christ. The 
living link between power and helplessness to 
which a man clings in the emergency of sin is 
intercession. That the Romish theology relegates 
to created beings. Our Protestant theology brings 
the penitent soul to the very God in the person of 
our Lord. 

With a great sense of need have we obtained our 
Protestant freedom in this thing. Modern thought 
has made it in theory so trite that we do not appre- 
ciate the magnitude of it till some emergency dis- 
covers to us what our plight would be without it. 
What would our practical sense of deliverance from 
sin be, if we had none greater or better than saints, 
living or dead, to indorse our prayers for it ? Re- 
verse the grooves of our supplications, so that they 
shall ascend not to the living and recreant Christ, 
but to St. Dominic or St. Bernard, and how much 



242 My Note-Book. 

of the peace of God could we ever get from them ? 
Materialize our mental image of our Lord to the 
drooping form in Rubens's " Descent from the 
Cross " or to the agonized visage of Guido's " Ecce 
Homo " ; how could we bear the revulsion which 
would come upon our present conception of Him ? 
Shall we not need something other than these 
before our dying eyes ? 

28. The Christian type of religious life fur- 
nishes an antidote to another stupendous error 
in human conceptions of God. Left to its own 
imaginings the human mind conceives of the life 
of God as an eternal repose. In the far, the long 
withdrawing recesses of primeval distance, some- 
where in the universe, immeasurably remote from 
human wants and sympathies — God is. That is 
all that we know of Him. So dreams our thought 
of God without the help of an incarnation. Buddha 
has done for us the best that man can do to formu- 
late to human thought the life of God, without a 
knowledge of Christ. 

Our Lord, on the other hand, has revealed God as 
the most intensely and benevolently active Being 
in the universe. We do not know that Christ 
ever spent an idle hour. Who believes that He 
ever felt the necessity of " killing time " ? Enter- 
prise and self-sacrifice follow as inevitable corol- 
laries from the consciousness of a living Christ in 
the believer's thought. We should have reason to 
distrust the history of Christianity if it had not 
produced such men as St. Paul, Francis Xavier, 



Theistic and Christian Types. 243 

Count Zinzendorf, and Henry Martyn. Such men 
are the direct product of the idea of Christ as a 
revelation of the life of God. 

29. The fact deserves emphatic mention that 
this variety of experience which we term Christian 
as distinct from Theistic has impressed itself on 
real life more vividly than any other which has 
wrought itself, on any larger scale, into human 
history. 

For proof of this we must turn again to the 
hymns of the Church. That which the Church 
loves most profoundly she sings most cordially. 
Of all her hymns, the choicest and dearest to 
Christian hearts in all ages have been those conse- 
crated to the worship of the living Christ. Some 
of them are older than any living language. The 
earliest known Greek poem on a sacred theme is a 
song of " Praise to Christ the Redeemer." 

This class of Christian hymns were the favorite 
songs of the early Christian homes. They have 
been sung at marriage-feasts, over the cradles of 
new-born children, at morning and evening and 
noontide prayers. They have been the most 
precious burial-hymns chanted beside the graves 
of saints. They have been the most inspiring bat- 
tle-songs of Christian armies. In hours of victory 
they have been the thanksgiving alike of the liv- 
ing and the dying. In civil wars, dying Christians 
of both armies, the victors and the vanquished, 
have joined their feeble voices in them on the field. 
This occurred on the field of Shiloh. 



244 My Note-Book. 

Hymns of this class have been the summons of 
great awakenings and reformations. Luther made 
Europe ring with new hymns in praise of God in 
Christ. The Moravian Brethren of Germany, and 
the Methodists of England, called back in the 
same way a decadent Church. 

Above all others, these have been the chosen 
hymns of martyrs. They have been sung in low 
tones, by hunted worshippers in dens and caves, 
and in the intervals of torture on the rack. The 
Albigensian Christians sang them while casting 
themselves into the flames kindled by Simon de 
Montfort. The Waldenses sung them in the fast- 
ness of the Maritime Alps, when they were com- 
pelled to smother their voices lest they should be 
heard by armed men in ambush. Margaret Wil- 
son sung fragments of them when tied by the min- 
ions of Claverhouse to the stake in Solway Frith. 
Women of gentle culture in the Netherlands who 
were buried alive sung snatches of them while the 
guards of " Alva the Butcher " were shovelling 
the earth in upon their living faces. 

30. Such is the volume of holy song which has 
borne down through the ages the very life of souls 
in adoration of Christ as God. Yet Matthew 
Arnold would have us believe that our faith in 
any personal God at all " cannot be verified ! " 
Our own Scriptures even do not teach it ! What 
living thing under the whole heavens, then, can 
"be verified"? That men and women and chil- 
dren have lived this faith, singing it through cen- 



Theistic and Christian Types. 245 

turies of suffering for it unto death, is an argument 
in proof of it, the same in kind and tenfold in 
force, with that which Emerson ascribes to Words- 
worth's " Ode on Immortality " in proof of that 
doctrine. 

31. An interesting incident to the history of 
the two varieties of religious life illustrated in the 
foregoing pages is the fact that they have impressed 
themselves upon the two grandest and most beau- 
tiful festival days which the world has known, — 
the Thanksgiving Day of New England and the 
English Christmas. Our fathers of the exodus 
from England likened themselves to the people 
of the more ancient exodus of Egypt. Though 
by no means indifferent to the institutions of the 
New Testament, yet they were in many things men 
of the older dispensation. The Mosaic Sabbath 
was their ideal of holy time. The Decalogue was 
their code of private morals. The abhorrence with 
which they recoiled from Romish festivals swept 
away with them the English Christmas. It was 
quite in the course of Nature that the only festival 
which they originated which has become national, 
should be in adoration of the Creator, the Protector, 
the Father, the God of the seed-time and the har- 
vest, rather than of Christ the Redeemer. It was 
in keeping with their departure from the traditions 
of the Mother Church in other things. 

The Church of England, on the other hand, hon- 
ored some of those traditions to her own hurt. But 
as an incident to her conservatism, she saved 



246 My Note-Book. 

to the whole English-speaking world the festival 
commemorative of the risen and ascended Christ. 
Thus the two great types of individual religious 
life which are natural to Christian believers, we 
find expressed in the two festivals which bid fair 
to become national in our country's history. 

32. Of the two varieties of Christian experience 
here developed, it may seem superfluous to inquire 
which is the superior. Each is the superior under 
its own conditions. Each is natural to the condi- 
tions which produce it. Neither is exclusive of 
the other. The possible and the actual range of 
Christian living are very expansive. Like the 
love of Christ, they have height and depth and 
length and breadth. The Divine toleration of 
diversities is very generous. God looks magnani- 
mously upon varieties of temperament and early 
training and inherited bias and outward circum- 
stance. If a man of meditative temperament 
inclines to one type, and a man of more demonstra- 
tive nature to another, God is not hypercritical 
in judging the one by the other's tastes. Dwell- 
ers in the mountains or on the sea may find in 
their surroundings food for one kind of religious 
growth, and inhabitants of cities who never see a 
horizon may experience more facile development 
in another kind. They whose education has made 
much of the Old Testament may expand in one 
way ; they whose training has had closer affinity 
with the New Testament may develop in another. 
Divine grace studies the history of the individual- 



Theistic and Christian Types. 247 

33. Nature often is made tributary to grace 
through the laws of heredity in ways which are 
intricate and wonderful. Here is a child born 
with a healthy physical inheritance, and especially 
with a dense and evenly balanced brain. He is 
therefore saved by ante-natal protection from the 
temptations and moral defeats which come from 
distempered nerves and tainted blood. Such a 
child, trained in the seclusion of a Christian home, 
is preserved by his very ignorance from many 
varieties of sin. He may, therefore, grow into 
" a state of grace " without knowing it. God the 
Creator, the Father, the Friend, may tacitly take 
the place of earthly father and mother in his lov- 
ing reverence, and he may never know the time of 
the* substitution. He may honestly say : "It was 
always thus with me." The moral horologe, in 
such a case, has no dial-plate. Christ may not 
become more than a historic fact to him till riper 
years and severer trials and the craft of Satan 
make sin more potentially real to him, and drive 
him to the great discovery. He finds out the 
reality of Christ, not till he feels his own need 
of Christ. 

34. Yet the whole inner spirit of these varieties 
of Christian living is one. They are varieties, not 
contraries. Each is the complement of the other. 
In a rounded and finished character both will 
appear in living beauty. * 

A resident of the city of Bath, England, a contem- 
porary with the Rev. William Jay, once compared 



248 My Note-Book. 

his preaching with that of a Unitarian preacher 
of the same city. He said that the one preached 
Christ as if there were no God, and the other 
preached God as if there were no Christ. No such 
contradiction appears in the characters of those 
formed by a full, balanced faith. In such charac- 
ters both these ideas are living forces. They work 
in harmony. 

35. In personal Christian growth we often 
observe a progress from the one to the other of 
these types of piety corresponding to that from 
the Old Testament to the New. Such progress 
indicates the tendency of character to grow by 
evolution rather than by revolution. Gradual 
increments are Nature's choice. Individuals may 
have their " fulness of time " as the world's his- 
tory has had. It may in both be marked by an 
"advent of Christ." God builds characters or 
stars in ways manifold. 



X. 

THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

1. The conversion of the world to Christ is a 
prophecy and an enterprise. We are prone to rest 
in the prophecy and to lag in the enterprise. At 
present it languishes, not for the want of resources, 
not for the want of faith in the issue, but for the 
want of character, consecrated and concentrated in 
its achievement. It needs to be prosecuted with 
an intensity of desire and will which shall have 
the force of a passion. The object is a con- 
quest, the grandest that is known to either his- 
tory or prophecy. It must be achieved, if at all, 
by the passion of conquest. It requires a force 
of human will, like that which created Moham- 
medanism. 

2. Is the passion of conquest impossible in the 
execution of a spiritual enterprise? For answer, 
be it observed that the love of science has some- 
times assumed this form and degree of heroism. 
De Quincey mentions a French physician who, 
in devotion to medical science, inoculated himself 
with the virus of a malignant cancer. Another 
did the same with the venom of hydrophobia before 
Pasteur was known. A third committed suicide 

249 



250 My Note-Book. 

with the fumes of burning charcoal, that he might 
record, for the benefit of his profession, the pulse 
of slowly approaching death by that me^ns. A 
fourth lowered himself into the crater of Vesu- 
vius, to the depth never before touched by human 
foot, that he might give to science memoranda 
of dying sensations which could be obtained in 
no other way. There is but one object which 
deserves self-sacrifice so heroic. It is that, or 
something akin to that, for which our Lord laid 
down His life. Is not the passion of Christian 
sacrifice equal to that of scientific research? 

3. A hopeful outlook upon the future of Christ- 
ianity is suggested by the fact that the principle 
of sympathy is more potent for good than for evil. 
Right is auxiliary to every other right. Wrong 
eventually wars with every other wrong. Good 
tends to union; evil to segregation. Selfishness, 
full-grown, is absolute isolation. The selfishness of 
evil, therefore, defeats itself. A world in which 
sin is regnant has only to be let alone to insure its 
ruin by internal convulsions. On the contrary, a 
body like the Church of Christ carries in its con- 
stitution the elements of conquest, through sym- 
pathy in feeling and concert in action. 

4. The radical conditions of the problem disclose 
another ground of hope in the fact that evil in this 
world exists under a destiny of reaction, which is 
fatal to its perpetuity. In many forms even its 
longevity yields to reactions, by which it destroys 
itself. In the form of bad governments evil tends 



The Future of Christianity. 251 

to extremes, which wear out the patience even of 
a bad world. Revolutions follow, which tear up 
society by the roots. Men who initiate the corrupt 
and the false in government, and build institutions 
of falsehood and corruption in their pride of suc- 
cess, grow weary of their own work. They pull 
down in rage what they built up in hope. Evil 
thus reacts at maturity upon the promise of its 
infancy. The major part of political history is 
made up of these retributive reactions, in which 
wrong dies by its own hand. 

In the destiny of false religions the same law 
holds good. Superstitions die suicidally. Even 
a bad conscience revolts from its own excesses. 
Heathen religions are not destroyed by the philos- 
ophies which grow up by their side. They die of 
their own corruptions. Christianity achieves its 
most brilliant successes by taking possession of the 
vacancies which such destructions leave behind 
them. 

5. Through its whole history the Christian 
religion has developed supreme affinities for best 
things. For the noblest culture, for purest morals, 
for magnificent literatures, for most finished civil- 
izations, for most energetic national temperaments, 
for most enterprising races, for the most virile 
and progressive stock of mind, it has manifested 
irresistible sympathies. It goes wherever it can 
find these superlative growths of human nature. 
Where it cannot find them, it creates them. Judg- 
ing its future by its past, no other system of human 



252 My Note-Book. 

thought has so splendid a destiny. It is the only 
system which possesses undying youth. 

6. The successes of Christianity are not to be 
measured by the increase of the Church alone. It 
has secondary purposes which yet enter into its 
predestined conquests. One of these is to act as a 
detective and remonstrant force in human society. 
" I bear tvitness to the truth." It has come into 
the world as a test of character. Its mission in 
part is to disclose evil which it does not rectify, 
and to protest against corruptions which it does 
not purify. For the vindication of the govern- 
ment of God, evil is not to go to its own place till 
it is found out. It must know itself, and be known 
to an observant universe, by the force of contrasts. 
This world is a spectacle to other worlds. 

7. Illustrations of this detective principle are 
witnessed when and where Christian character is 
most positive. Wicked men become eminently 
wicked when and where good men are eminently 
good. Degree matches degree. The secret depths 
of depravity are unveiled. Sin acts itself out in 
preparation for judgment upon its malign matu- 
rity. In the natural course of events, we should 
expect the final triumphs of Christianity to suc- 
ceed conflicts with the matured and concentrated 
forces of depravity. The Gog and the Magog of 
prophecy have a foundation in the nature of the 
things concerned. 

8. A fact often overlooked in our prognostica- 
tions of the conversion of the world is the im- 



The Future of Christianity. 253 

mensely augmented vitality of modern nations, 
and of races of modern birth, as compared with 
those of earlier ages. From antediluvian times 
downward, the tendency of things has been to 
pack human life more and more densely with 
eventful history. Human character has been broad- 
ened and deepened. The resources of race have 
multiplied. Man is another being now than he 
was in Syria or Arabia when the race was young. 
There is more of him in the aggregate ; not in 
numbers only, but in virility of character. He 
leaves behind him when he dies a more magnificent 
past than he inherited at his birth. 

9. National destinies also develop more rapidly, 
and mature with more weight of history. The 
same underlying causes which have made armies 
colossal in size, and almost resistless in the enginery 
of war, tend also to make the development of moral 
forces more rapid, and to hasten on ultimate events. 
A year now is equivalent to a decade in the time 
of Charlemagne. The face of the world and of 
the Church to-day has the look of being in the 
final ages of time. Men now living have the 
promise of witnessing an advance toward the end 
of the present economy unequalled by the progress 
of any human lifetime of the past. 

10. It is misleading, therefore, to conceive of 
the conversion of the world as a remote event. 
Prophecy declares what history hints at, that the 
closing stages of that work will be developed with 
unprecedented rapidity. History will grow and 



254 My Note-Book. 

mass itself in great events with reduplicated 
momentum. 

11. It appears probable that in the future prog- 
ress of the Christian faith large expansion is to 
take place in the breadth of Christian mind. A 
profound principle of proportion in character was 
announced in the declaration of our Lord: " There 
hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist ; 
nevertheless, he that is least in the kingdom of 
Heaven is greater than he." The tendency of 
Christian ideas is to mental growth. The mind 
must expand which takes them in with cordial 
sympathy. The conversion of Saul of Tarsus 
wrought in him an intellectual revolution. 

12. The working of this principle seems likely 
to be redoubled in creative force, by the multiply- 
ing of nationalities and races under the sway of 
Christian thought. The Church of the future 
cannot be provincial in character any more than 
in locality. That enrichment of life-blood which 
springs from the intermingling of races must 
become tributary to the ultimate types of Christ- 
ianity. This is one of the ways in which is to be 
developed the tendency of Christianity to take 
possession of best things. 

13. The work of the world's conversion suffers 
for the want of that prestige which in any great 
enterprise of a spiritual nature comes only from 
rapidity of progress. When such an enterprise 
lags, something more than time is lost. Imper- 
ativeness of moral impression is lost. The respect 



The Future of Christianity. 255 

which is felt for congruity of the work with the 
spirit of its executives is lost. The reduplication 
of force which springs from momentum is lost. 
Natural laws are not suspended in the working of 
Divine power. 

14. Lord Collingwood of the English navy used 
to teach his gunners that if they could deliver 
three broadsides in five minutes, no enemy could 
stand before them. The impression on the enemy's 
morale would double the force of the assault. His 
gunners learned to do it in three minutes and a 
half. A similar principle holds good in moral 
warfare. Motion itself is force; speed is force 
reduplicated. One brief period of rapid conquest 
in the progress of Christianity would concentrate 
the mind of the world upon it as the work of God. 
For moral impression, it would be worth twice 
that of the same amount of gain extended over 
twice the length of time. And in such an enter- 
prise, moral impression is the germ of ultimate 
success. 

15. The composite structure of the Anglo- 
American stock of mind marks it as that from 
which the most prolific resources of power are to 
come for the work of the world's salvation. Great 
Britain and America are peopled by races more 
diverse, and in some respects more antagonistic, 
than are found in any other portion of the world. 
Such opposites blended into one usually crystallize 
into elect nations. From such nations spring elect 
families and individuals. These develop into 



256 My Note-Book. 

chosen leaders and foreseeing pioneers. It is not 
without significance to the future of the Christian 
Church that the English language already sways 
one-quarter of the world, and much more than that 
proportion of the thinking power of the world. 
Back of that fact lie immense forces of race which 
are committed to the ultimate ascendency of Christ- 
ianity. 

16. The Church will not attain to her millen- 
nial expansion till we give freer play, in our plans 
and expectations, to the laws of hereditary grace. 
There is an extreme of individualism in the theory 
of conversion entertained by many, which virtually 
ignores those laws. Yet nothing is more obvious 
in the Scriptural theory of Church extension as 
displayed in Scriptural history. Our faith in them 
should lead us to work in line with them. We 
should work expectantly. We should look to find 
a feeder to the growth of the Church in the natu- 
ral outflow of ancestral piety in the persons of 
Christian children to the remotest generation. Our 
colonial fathers and mothers of New England were 
accustomed to pray for the conversion of their 
posterity to the end of time. Theirs was a philo- 
sophical as well as a far-sighted faith. 

17. The law of hereditary grace is a magnifi- 
cent example of the " conservation of forces." No 
other is so sublime or so beneficent. Under its 
operation every new-born child of Christian parents 
enters on existence under protective conditions. 
In the natural order of things, his salvation should 



The Future of Christianity. 257 

be treated as a thing of course. A fearful revul- 
sion and contradiction of Divine law takes place 
if he is not saved. In God's plan of procedure, 
the growth of the Church is ordained mainly by 
natural increase under Christian parentage. Here, 
as elsewhere, grace works in the groove of Nature. 
It is not that holiness is inherited ; no form of 
character is so. But the elements are inherited in 
which, as in its natural soil, holiness germinates. 
A momentum towards right is thus created, which 
it requires an incalculable force of evil to over- 
power. Plant an acorn anywhere and anyhow in 
good soil, and it will grow upward, not downward. 
By a law of its being, its tiny sprout will seek the 
sun. So a child set in the groundwork of a Christ- 
ian family, and nurtured in its bland and pure 
atmosphere, should, by the very conditions of his 
existence, grow up towards God and Heaven. His 
failure to do so is a moral catastrophe. It is against 
Nature. 

18. To specify but one of the instrumentalities 
by which the grace of God reaches the heart of a 
Christian child through the channel of his parent- 
age, look at the moral power of the family altar. 
Xothing else in a Christian home lives in memory 
with such regenerating force as that which inheres 
in a father's or a mother's prayers. One such child 
of prayer, when an old man near the time of his 
translation, recorded his own experience in a com- 
munication to a friend, as follows : — 

" I remember our family prayers in my childhood 



258 My Note-Booh, 

as if they were voices from Heaven. I owe my 
salvation to them. The scene can never fade from 
my mind. The room in which we knelt, the light 
of the setting sun, which often streamed in through 
the western window, the sweet voice of my mother 
in the hymns we sang, the low and loving tones in 
which my father used to plead with God for us, 
are as fresh in my recollection to-day as they were 
sixty years ago. No other scene this side of Heaven 
is so hallowed in my thoughts. It all came back 
to me at the only time in my life at which I strayed 
into a theatre. It made the hour one of misery to 
me. As a power of restraint to keep a young man 
from evil ways, give me first and above all others 
of human origin the memory of family prayers." 

19. If the natural law of increase in the line of 
Christian families should come under the power 
of the grace of God, without exceptions or inter- 
missions, how long would it be before the present 
relative proportions of the Church and the world 
would be reversed? The problem is susceptible 
of a mathematical solution. The tendency of 
religion in a family is to prolong its line ; that of 
ir religion, to shorten the line. Depraved families 
have brief histories. Ancestral virtue has a long 
life. A hint of this contrast in the destiny of 
families is expressed in the third commandment 
of the Decalogue. Let it be as definitely wrought 
into the expectant faith of believers in the conver- 
sion of the world, and that event would soon be 
more than prophecy. 



The Future of Christianity. 259 

20. The law of hereditary grace should affect 
the methods of Christian usefulness in labors for 
the conversion of children and youth. Those of 
godly parentage should not be taught the necessity 
of a convulsive change in regeneration Such a 
change in a Christian child is unnatural. It is not 
the common law of Christian life. The ideal of 
that which was to them an impossible change of 
character has doomed - many such children to a 
period of unspoken despair. Despair aggravates 
sin by developing the consciousness of sin. Re- 
morse without hope develops guilt as nothing else 
can. Such children often become unconscious 
fatalists in all that concerns their own salvation. 

21. The law of hereditary grace suffers an occa- 
sional intermission. Real life sometimes discloses 
a suspension of this law in the descent of moral 
tendency from parent to child. One, even two 
generations may be omitted in the inheritance of 
the blessing, and it will reappear in the generations 
following. King Hezekiah, of the line of Jewish 
monarchs, was a devout man. Manasseh, his 
son, and Anion, his grandson, were exceptionally 
depraved. Men must be so who resist innate 
tendencies to virtue. But in Josiah, the great- 
grandson of Hezekiah, the line of godly graces reap- 
peared. The unwritten history of Christian families 
often discovers the same phenomena of intermission 
and resumption of the law of gracious inheritance. 
Through the long run of generations, the law de- 
velops a wonderful tenacity of life. 



260 My Note-Book. 

22. The disastrous consequences of a neglect 
of the laws of heredity in our estimate of the 
moral conditions of Christian children had a strik- 
ing illustration many years ago, in the case of a 
youth who afterwards became the Governor of one 
of the Middle States of this country. He had 
been born and nurtured in a family of Scotch- 
Presbyterian descent. At about the age of fifteen 
years he sought the advice of his pastor respecting 
a profession of religion by communion with the 
Church. His yet infantile faith was tested by the 
standard given in "Edwards on the Religious 
Affections." He was asked if he had felt this and 
felt that revolutionary change in his mental exer- 
cises. Had he made new discoveries of God ? 
Was he overwhelmed by his conciousness of guilt? 
Did he feel that he deserved to be damned for his 
sins ? Did he so submit his destiny to the will of 
God that he was willing to be damned if God had 
so decreed ? He knew nothing of all that in his 
own experience. Its very dialect was a strange 
tongue. He only knew that he loved Christ, and 
it seemed to him that he had always done so. 

It was probably a case of unconscious regenera- 
tion, perhaps in infancy. But he was told to wait 
till he was old enough to experience a change of 
heart, and to know it. When it came, it would be 
indicated by signs which could not be mistaken. 
The consequence was humiliating to the religious 
enlightenment of the age. With what was to him 
an impossible ideal of conversion before him, he 



The Future of Christianity. 261 

entered on active life with no faith in himself as a 
child of God. Years followed years of prayerless 
life. Conscience suffered from a religion of de- 
spair. It was not till fifty years had rolled by that 
he again summoned courage to seek admission to 
the Church. Half a century of Christian peace 
and usefulness was sacrificed by the want of faith 
in God's working under the laws of Christian 
parentage. 

23. It should stimulate our confidence in the 
future of the Christian religion to contemplate the 
appalling results which must follow the failure of 
such a faith to realize the promise of its triumph. 
The downfall of such a system of beliefs would 
plunge the thinking portion of mankind into an 
abyss below the lowest ever conceived of by Roman 
pessimism when the old mythologies expired. The 
gloom of universal incertitude would be inevitable. 
" Deeper than ever plummet sounded " is the ocean 
of despair which would then roll over the nations. 
The corollary would be indisputable that, if such 
a faith cannot commend itself to human reason as 
true, then nothing is true but the theorems of 
Euclid. Annihilation would be the only possibility 
in human destiny which could balance the fact of 
death. Immortality, if credited, would become a 
doom. Insanity and suicide would grow with the 
growth of liberal culture. Such is the forecast of 
the world's destiny which men of agnostic nega- 
tions offer as a substitute for the Christian promise 
of redemption. 



262 My Note-Booh 

24. It is well known that many of the most 
thoughtful minds in Christendom believe that the 
final conflict between good and evil in this world 
will be raged between Christianity in its maturest 
type and the extreme of unbelief represented by 
avowed and cultivated Atheism. It is to be a war 
of giants. It will not be provincial in its range. 
Nor will it be limited, as the moral conflicts of the 
past have been, to a few representative leaders of 
Christian sects, and a few champions of the ex- 
treme and erratic ideas of unbelief. It will be like 
the War of the Rebellion in America — a conflict 
of opposing civilizations. Nations will be its 
armies. The world will be the battle-ground, and 
there will be no lookers-on. 

Such is the conception of the closing age of this 
world's history, of which many Christian minds find 
symbolic hints in Biblical prophecy. Philosophic 
thinkers discern signs of colossal preparations for 
it in the present state of the world and the drift 
of history. 

25. One of the tokens of the spirit of progress 
with which Christianity has leavened human soci- 
ety is witnessed in the alleviation of the rancor 
which once infected religious controversy. 

One cannot but contrast hopefully the genial 
temper of modern religious debate with that which 
history pictures to our fancy of the controversies 
among the early Protestant reformers. Luther 
called a brother monk a " beast," and another a 
"hog." Even if it was true, it was not exactly 



The Future of Christianity. 263 

fraternal. Calvin denounces a brother Protestant 
as a " clog,*' and Servetus he branded as a " viper." 
As to the honorary titles of " devil," " fiend," " Anti- 
christ," they were like household words. They 
were bandied about like shuttlecocks. There was 
a great deal of latent profaneness in the contro- 
versial anathemas of the olden times. 

Churchly disruptions within the memory of 
men now living have given vent to fraternal bit- 
terness scarcely less revolting. American slavery 
tended to demonize everything that it touched. 
How many ecclesiastical assemblies have been 
infuriated by it ! In one such, a reverend brother 
from Alabama affectionately invited his brother 
from Ohio, who had just acknowledged his invest- 
ments in the " underground railroad," to visit him 
in his Southern home, and assured him that he 
would be welcomed to tar and feathers and a 
lamp-post ! 

I am reminded also of one of the critical assem- 
blies of the Presbyterian Church, which occurred 
in my later boyhood. One of the several Drs. 
Breckinridge, brothers, was pre-eminent in his 
power of invective. He had an equal gift of the 
dialect of sympathy and of compliment. In public 
salutations he was a prince, so courtly was his 
manner and so elegant his style. His sermons 
were models of smooth and flowing rhetoric. On 
the occasion referred to, a brother presbyter of the 
New School rose to reply to the doctor's rasping 
criticism of him on the day before. To this hour 



264 My Note-Booh 

his introductory remark clings to my memory. 
Said he : " My brother from Kentucky well knows 
how to speak in elegant and oily phrase, but on 
this occasion he has misplaced his gift, and has 
poured out on my devoted head the oil of vitriol." 
Half a century has improved the civilization of our 
public bodies. We seldom hear in our religious 
convocations a specimen of the vitriolic comity. 

26. Suspending the argument from prophecy, a 
forecast of the issue of the conflict of Christianity 
with the forces of evil in this world may be 
founded upon the history of Christianity hitherto. 
That which it has already done for mankind gives 
no doubtful promise of what it will do in the last 
times, be they distant or near. 

To estimate such a history free from mental 
bias, we should imagine the effects which it 
records to have been wrought by other causes. 
Suppose them to have been the fruit of other 
sacred books than ours. Imagine that the Hindoo 
Vedas had achieved for the world all that the 
Hebrew and Christian Scriptures have achieved, in 
creating nations, literatures, civilizations ; could a 
doubt exist of their final conquest of all other 
powers which create human destiny? Confucius 
died about twenty-four hundred years ago. Imag- 
ine that his writings had made the Chinese Empire 
what the British Empire is to-day. Would philo- 
sophic minds look farther to discover the system 
of morals or religion which is destined to over- 
spread the world? 



The Future of Christianity. 265 

27. In estimating the adaptations of Christian- 
ity to be a world-wide faith in the ages to come, 
one fact should have decisive weight, — that it is 
the only system of faith of which the world has 
made trial which combines dogmatic religious 
beliefs with corresponding principles of morality. 
It builds ethics on religion. The ancient religions, 
excepting that of the Hebrews, which was Christ- 
ianity in embryo, had no systems of ethics. They 
did not profess to have any. Ante-Christian 
ethics, so far as they existed outside of Hebrew 
literature, were independent of religion. Neither 
had any radical relation to the other. A Greek 
or Roman devotee might be guilty of all the crimes 
and vices known to the criminal code of ancient 
jurisprudence, and it made no difference to his 
character as a religionist. He might be the most 
execrable of mankind in the courts of law, yet he 
could cross the street into a temple of religion, and 
there be a saint. In the temple of Bacchus or of 
Venus his very vices were virtues. The identity 
of morals and religion is a Christian discovery. 

28. There are religions of the soil. They abide 
where they were born. They develop no power 
of self-expansion and no facility of migration. 
Rooted in the tastes of one race, they do not grow 
into affinity with other races. They are intrinsi- 
cally provincial and stationary. Of this immobile 
type Christianity is not. It has restless migratory 
impulses — tastes we may almost call them — which 
forecast its destiny of dominion. It is emphatically 



266 My Note-Book. 

the religion of colonization and of commerce. 
Always and everywhere it is the pioneer of benefi- 
cent change and of undying youth. It transplants 
itself into nascent languages and cements antago- 
nistic races from which elect nations spring. 

29. The predicted triumphs of Christianity 
suggest the very probable hypothesis that in forms 
of oral address it is to command a hearing from 
immense assemblies. Certain features of Christian 
life require for their best development the inter- 
play of sympathy and the stimulus of members in 
such assemblies. There are graces of the closet 
and graces of the crowd. The self-diffusive force 
of our religion also cannot have full sway with- 
out the incidental aid of multitudes to work with 
as well as to work upon. 

30. The concentration of populations in great 
cities, in this view, offers one of its best aspects. 
It gives to the future of Christian enterprise the 
opportunities which it needs for the assembling 
of large congregations. A clerical traveller visit- 
ing the market places and amphitheatres of South- 
ern Europe can scarcely escape the thought of the 
conveniences they furnish for discourse to immense 
numbers in the open air. Imagine an Italian 
Whitefield preaching in the Colosseum at Rome! 
The golden age of street-preaching is yet to be. 

31. The preaching of the Gospel will not 
achieve results which will much exceed its present 
average of success till the spirit of aristocratic 
caste is extirpated from our churches. Metro- 



The Future of Christianity. 267 

politan clusters of church-edifices in fashionable 
localities and from which the poor are practically 
excluded are a flat contradiction to the spirit of 
our Lord. Alienation of classes in the Christian 
brotherhood is a blank wall in the path of progress 
which no human power can overleap. 

32. The religion of Christ contains an element 
of power over the future in its teaching of the pos- 
sibility of amiable relations between God and men. 
Paganism knew nothing of such relations between 
the worshipper and the objects of worship. The 
mythologies, speaking in the general, had no lov- 
able gods. The incentive to worship was fear. The 
gods were deified men. If not purely malign, they 
were selfishness personified. As such they leaned 
to malign qualities in character. Hindoo mothers 
flung their children to the crocodiles of the Ganges 
as a propitiatory offering to deities whose nature 
was like the crocodile. Love from man to God 
and love from God to man are Christian discov- 
eries. Human worship, just in proportion as it has 
differed from Christian worship, has developed a 
frightful approximation to devil worship. Pagan 
art discloses this in the manufacture of deities. 
Idols are frequently hideous representatives of the 
malign passions. 

33. It is impossible to understand some passages 
of the Scriptures otherwise than as teaching that 
the moral power of Christian believers is compe- 
tent to effect results in the moral world which 
shall have the impressiveness of miracles in the 



268 My Note-Book. 

natural world. Until such phenomena appear in 
the progress of the world's conversion, we must 
believe that immense energies lie occult and unused 
in the bosom of the Church. 

34. Christian evangelizing of the nations has 
now a history which has made the theory of mis- 
sions a science. One of its axioms is that civiliza- 
tion is a sequence, not an antecedent of the evan- 
gelizing of a heathen people. The most facile and 
expeditious way to uplift men to the level of civil 
freedom is first to Christianize them. The initial 
step in fitting men for self-government is to teach 
them obedience to the government of God. Noth- 
ing else dignifies man in his own consciousness 
like a spiritual religion. The first sign of success 
in the early missions to the Hawaiian Islands was 
that the natives began to wear clothes. From that 
germ of the sense of personal dignity the gifts and 
graces of an advanced civilization have grown. 

35. In estimating the probabilities of the future 
progress of mankind, the fact is a significant one, 
that no nation has ever voluntarily receded into 
darker ages than the best in its history. Conserva- 
tive tastes have never driven or enticed a civilized 
people backward by their own choice. Romantic 
sentiment may look backward, but the common 
sense never walks backward of its own will. A 
complex civilization never gives way to one of 
primeval simplicity. Philosophers of erratic no- 
tions have sported with the idea that savage life is 
happier or purer than that of high culture, but no 



The Future of Christianity. 269 

nation or race has ever been so fascinated by it as 
to attempt its reduction to practice in real life. 
Eager pedestrians lean forward. So does the 
human race bend with all its will power into the 
future. 

36. Especially is it true that those forces which 
Christianity has put into the civilization of the 
great races are growing forces. They have been 
born with a destiny of thrift. Catastrophes which 
threaten their perpetuity are never long-lived. The 
tendencies to national decline which they set in 
motion are tidal movements — not the oceanic 
currents of the deep seas. We do not yearn for 
mediaeval life any more than we do for the tastes 
of our cannibal ancestors. A voluntary retrograde 
from a Christian civilization by a nation once pos- 
sessed of it would be equivalent to national suicide 
— a doom which no people ever sought in fact or 
tolerated in idea. 

37. The advancement of religion in the world 
often seems to be threatened with suspension by 
its perversions and corruptions. Superstitious 
beliefs, spurious revivals, and fanatical reforms 
often have the look of a decline and fall of best 
things. Best things corrupted become the worst. 
Such is sometimes the look of affairs on the sur- 
face of social agitations. Not so is it written in 
the book of destiny. Things evil, when stirred up 
by a quickened moral sense, have a chance of 
regeneration. Spurious revivals set men to ponder- 
ing the eternal verities. The very judgment that 



270 My Note-Booh. 

they are spurious is founded on a superior ideal. 
Imbecile superstitions are built on a certain re- 
siduum of truth, without which men could not 
recognize their imbecility. Fanatical convulsions 
awaken a great deal of sober and healthy think- 
ing. The existence of the extreme proves the 
reality of the mean. So it is that evil works out 
good through Divine reactions. Light gleams out 
of darkness. Even lightning from thunder-clouds 
is light. Salvation armies and Christian crusades 
are not the inspired models of religious activity, 
but it requires a profounder religious life to create 
the intuition that they are not. Christianity is a 
system of beliefs and practices which has immense 
powers of deglutition and assimilation. It can 
carry a dense mass of evil in its history without 
lapsing into a state of moral convulsion. 

38. It is a striking fact, bearing upon this 
world's future, that civilization gives no sign of 
perpetuity in history, till it is transplanted into 
Christianity. Independently, like all other social 
forces of human origin, it rots and dies. Only 
when it is rooted in Christian ideas does it give 
promise of a future. The most corrupt nations 
have been the most accomplished in civilized graces. 
The most appalling downfalls of great races have 
been the ending of the most illustrious careers of 
national renown. The ante-Christian civilizations 
have betrayed a frightful tendency to the develop- 
ment of cruelty and lust in national entertain- 
ments and the rites of national religions. They 



The Future of Christianity. 271 

taught men to luxuriate in the sufferings of their 
fellows, and to adore their deities by acts of besti- 
ality. 

39. A fact not often estimated at its full worth 
in our forecast of this world's future is that in its 
Biblical representations the law of prayer has a 
certain supremacy over other laws concerned in 
human destiny. Within certain limits sovereignty 
is assigned to mind over matter. The moral king- 
dom takes precedence of the realm of nature. 
Our earth gives abundant evidence of its sub- 
ordination to moral uses and redemptive purposes. 
And in keeping with this adjustment of things, 
an imperial authority is awarded in the Bible to 
prayer over material forces. 

Fixed laws of Nature certainly have been sus- 
pended at the bidding of believing prayer. More 
than once the grave has given up the dead at its 
imperial command. We assume more than we 
know, therefore, when we affirm that never, under 
any possible contingencies, can such an obeisance 
of natural to moral law take place again. There 
is a startling freedom from qualification in the 
language of Biblical assurance to a Christian 
suppliant. It is not uttered stealthily in a whisper. 
Nor is it expressed in dubious intimations, as if the 
speaker feared that he might say too much. 

40. It is impossible, within hearing of this 
regal echo of inspired promise, to resist the con- 
viction that, in the main, prayer is yet one of the 
occult forces of the universe. Immense reserves 



272 My Note-Book. 

of its power are yet latent and unused by Christ- 
ian faith. It has never yet been put to the full 
proof of its possibilities. Of all the forces known 
to us, it is the last that can be imperilled by 
future discoveries of the works and ways of God. 
Who can dare to limit the resources of such a power 
over the ultimate destinies of mankind? Espe- 
cially when a spiritual power like this is com- 
mitted to a spiritual work like that of the world's 
con-conversion, with the sympathies and corre- 
spondencies of myriads of Christian minds inter- 
playing between, Avhere is room for doubt of the 
result? 

41. The outlook of conquest which Biblical 
prophecy gives to the closing periods of mundane 
history suggests the possible return of miracle to 
the resources of the Church. Who knows enough 
of the marvels of those last times, to affirm that 
the exigencies which they will create will not also 
create such a demand for miracle as to make it 
reasonable to the mind of God ? Who knows 
enough of the possibilities of expansion in spiritual 
forces, to declare that prayer cannot achieve ascend- 
ency over natural laws in those coming ages, as 
it did in the saintly history of ancient times ? 

42. It is cheering to observe, even in the pres- 
ent conditions of Christendom, tokens of a much 
broader subjection of civilized mind to the spirit- 
ual reign of truth than is commonly recognized in 
the statistics of Christian sects. The number of 
regenerate souls is probably much larger than the 



The Future of Christianity. 273 

Church reckons among her converts. Circles upon 
circles of illumined minds revolve around the 
solar centre which the Church represents. They 
resemble the rings of Saturn. How many of them 
are elect spirits we cannot estimate. But that 
multitudes of them are such cannot well be ques- 
tioned. A Christian civilization is a grand prod- 
uct of Christian redemption. Lines of spiritual 
sympathy run to and fro between them. If we 
could express in numbers the spiritual conquests 
of the Cross, we should doubtless find millions 
upon millions of true believers in these outside 
realms of civilized thought. 

Christianity is thus putting forth its feelers to 
gather in uncounted and unknown fruits. Many 
such saved ones are in the twilight of corrupt 
churches in which truth is not yet extinct. Com- 
merce has carried germs of Christian thought into 
the shadow of heathen temples. Christianized 
languages are crowding hard upon those of pagan 
origin. Christian ideas of liberty and of political 
economy are pushing their way underneath an- 
cient despotisms. It is impossible that such tribu- 
taries to the Gospel should not scatter broadcast 
the seeds which shall spring up in the regeneration 
of souls. The disclosures of the great Day will 
surprise us by the magnitude of its spiritual 
triumphs. Despised . races will be seen to con- 
tribute to immense majorities of the redeemed. 
God counts nothing lost which can be saved. 
These secondary workings of redemptive purpose 



274 My Note-Booh 

are preparatory to the marvellous rapidity of its 
achievements in this world's closing scenes. They 
give more than hints of the fact that the last sun 
which will dawn on its spiritual history will go 
down in unclouded glory. 



XL 

METHODISM -ITS WORK AND ITS WAYS. 

1. The Methodist Episcopal Church is a strik- 
ing illustration of the principle that every great 
Christian sect is built on a necessity. It comes 
into being because it must come. 

The rise of Methodism was the birth of a spirit- 
ual reform of which all the Christian denomi- 
nations in Great Britain and America were in 
desperate need. The Established Churches of 
England and Scotland were dying of spiritual 
ancemia. Dr. Blair at Edinburgh and Bishop Por- 
teous at London were droning moral platitudes in 
the pulpit, while the masses of the people, espe- 
cially in England, never heard of them or of the 
Gospel they professed to preach. Never before, 
nor since, has the phenomenon been so signally 
developed, of Christianity gasping in the struggle 
to live on the religion of Nature. The religion of 
the realm was Christianity without Christ. All 
that was peculiar to it as a way of salvation was 
practically ignored. Among the ruling classes 
religious convictions had no intensity, and relig- 
ious life no reality. 

2. Bishop Butler gave it as a reason for publish- 

275 



276 My Note-Book. 

ing the "Analogy," that "it has come to be taken 
for granted that Christianity is no longer a subject 
of inquiry, but is now discovered to be fictitious." 
As for the English court, Bishop Stevens has told 
the whole story in saying : " It was a royal brothel." 
Dr. Samuel Johnson was contemporary with John 
Wesley. He told his friend Boswell : " I can 
remember the time when it was common for Eng- 
lish gentlemen to go to bed drunk every night in 
the week, and they were thought none the worse 
of for it." Such was England when Methodism 
came as an angel of rebuke. 

The chief power in saving to the future the old 
Church of Cranmer and Ridley was the Methodist 
revival. It broke upon the kingdom in tongues 
of flame. Then was the golden age of field-preach- 
ing. In the venerable cathedrals of England the 
magnates of the Church on the Lord's Day preached 
to a dozen hearers ; sometimes to less ; occasionally 
to nobody but the sexton and the choir. An 
audience of two hundred was a crowd. The Dean 
of St. Patrick's in Dublin once preached to the 
sexton alone. His sermon, all told, as my mem- 
ory recalls the story, was : " Be a good man, John, 
and a Tory." At the same time Wesley and 
Whitefield were haranguing ten and twenty thou- 
sands at a time in the open air. The wisdom of 
the city fathers of Boston had not then illu- 
mined the world. 

3. The movement began, as religious awaken- 
ings usually do, among the lower orders. But its 



Methodism — its Work and its Ways. 277 

refluent waves soon rolled up over the heights of 
cultivated society. The infidel lords, Bolingbroke 
and Chesterfield, rode out in their crested car- 
riages to see " what these Methodist loons were 
making such an ado about." David Hume and 
Benjamin Franklin studied the phenomenon with 
knitted brows as a psychological enigma. Every 
Protestant sect in England, Wales, Scotland, Ire- 
land, and America felt the reviving thrill. 

4. Methodism in those days had its baptism of 
fire. It met the usual fate of religious reforma- 
tions in being detested and maligned. The name, 
as is well known, became the synonym of social 
vulgarity. To become a " Methody " was to drop 
out of sight of respectability. Men lost caste by 
it, even in humble life. Chimney-sweeps and boot- 
blacks grinned at the discovery that there was a 
rung of the social ladder below theirs. Cowardly 
inquirers denounced " the humbug " roundly in 
the daytime, and crept into the chapels on the sly 
in the twilight. Families were disrupted by it, as 
by the " Wars of the Roses." Sons and daughters 
were disinherited for leaving the parish church for 
the conventicle. " I came not to send peace on 
earth, but a sword." But none the less for that, 
the mother church, and every church, felt the new 
spirit in the air. 

5. The Church of England could no more with- 
stand it than she could have withstood the day of 
judgment. To her it was the day of judgment, 
but for the " remnant which was left " within her 



278 My Note-Book, 

pale which recognized the voice of a prophet. 
English Christianity has never lost the elements 
of spiritual life which Methodism, by direct reproof 
and by the power of contrast, then put into it. 
For her noble missions of a later day, for her fidel- 
ity to the faith as expressed in her incomparable 
Litany, and for her faithfulness to the masses of 
the poor at home, in the ways practicable to her 
stately polity, the Church of England to-day is 
largely indebted to the stimulant and remonstrant 
action of Methodism upon her vital powers. It 
regenerated them. It brought back into living use 
the resources which had been buried in her ancient 
standards, and her Book of Prayer, and her mar- 
tyrology. Methodism saved the Anglican Church 
from extinction. It was a re-enforcement of apos- 
tolic Christianity, also, in every other Christian 
denomination in the English-speaking nations and 
colonies. We have all felt the throb of its pulsa- 
tions. It has been what new blood is to falling 
dynasties and decadent races. 

6. Methodism has done for the Christian world 
another service. She has contributed improve- 
ments of inestimable value to the popular theol- 
ogy. In theological science, strictly so called, 
Methodism has not been illustrious. Her great 
theologians are yet to be. Wesley seems not to 
have cared much about truth in dogmatic forms. 
His mind was of the executive order. His convic- 
tions were facts articulate. He seized upon a few 
fundamental ideas of Christianity as facts rather 



Methodism — its Work and its Ways. 279 

than as doctrines. Beyond affirming these, he 
built a church on the principle, as he put it, " of 
liberty to think and let think." The leaders of 
the reform, ' with perhaps one exception, were 
preachers rather than theologians. Its throne was 
the pulpit, not the school. Yet to the theology of 
the people its pulpit has done good, knightly ser- 
vice. It has been a stout ally of those who have 
labored to eliminate from the popular notion of 
Christianity the fictions of limited atonement and 
the servitude of the human will. 

7. Before the advent of Methodism, these dog- 
mas, to the majority of minds which came under 
their influence, had made salvation an impracticable 
business. Theoretically, the popular mind could 
make nothing else of it. The speculations in 
which adroit minds essayed to untie the knot in 
which these dogmas had bound popular inquiry 
had little weight in the pulpit. They were not 
useful there, because they could not be used. In 
many pulpits the preaching of repentance to un- 
regenerate men had absolutely ceased. Logical 
minds holding those dogmas could not preach it. 
In private they said so, and in the pulpit they 
were dumb. To preach repentance as a duty to 
men who could not repent, and who until they did 
could have no assurance that the sacrifice of Christ 
had any concern with them, was an insult to the 
hearer and stultification to the preacher. Sensible 
men felt this and revolted. They would not sow 
seed on a marble quarry. Rowland Hill once, on 



280 My Note-Book. 

entering a certain church, was admonished : " We 
preach only to the elect here." " So will I," he 
replied, " if you will put a label on them." 

8. Methodism cut the knot. Wesley and his 
associates denied the limitation of the atoning 
sacrifice by Divine decree. They did it in no 
obscure or silken speech. They denounced the 
dogma with vehemence and scorn. They defied it 
as an invention of the devil. Indeed, throughout 
the controversy with Calvinism, Wesley was a 
savage. He spared neither foe nor friend, not 
even Whitefield. He gave us the iron hand bare 
of the velvet glove. But his unkempt ferocity of 
method achieved its object. It said what he 
meant, and hewed the way clean to the liberty of 
proclaiming a free salvation. That he and his 
successors flung broadcast. They preached it 
exultingly. They preached it like men freeborn. 
It gave a ring of gladness to their ministrations. 
The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills 
like lambs, at the sound of their voices. 

9. There was an electric spring to conquest in 
the Gospel as they projected it upon the quivering 
sensibilities of men, which made it seem to them 
a novelty. The immense assemblies in the fields, 
when they listened to the impassioned harangues 
of Whitefield and Wesley, seemed to themselves 
to hear the word of God for the first time. Then, 
first, the offer of salvation meant something to 
them. Men and women who, all their lives, had 
been droning the confession that they were " mis- 



Methodism — its Work and its Ways. 281 

erable sinners," not believing a word of it, sud- 
denly found out that it was a fact. Sermons, as 
they heard them, were full of personal allusions. 
Then Christ became to them a necessity; and 
because a necessity, a reality. The sympathy of 
numbers redoubled the force of the convictions 
which sprung up in the soul of every one. Light 
shone reflected from a thousand mirrors. The 
Day of Pentecost dawned again. 

10. Human freedom in matters of religion came 
to the faith of the Methodist commonalty more 
circuitously. Yet it came with scarcely less power 
of persuasion as a corollary from the ministra- 
tions of the Methodist pulpit. Not as clear-cut 
dogma in theological science, such as it appears 
— and nowhere else so luminously — in the lat- 
ter Calvinism of New England, but as fact, the 
freedom of the human will has been built into 
Methodist theology as the people have conceived 
it from the beginning. Men who have denied 
it as dogma have used it as fact. The Wesleys 
denied it, but John Wesley preached it in his 
forty thousand sermons, and Charles Wesley sung 
it in hymns which have been heard around the 
globe. 

This contradiction, which was no contradiction, 
grew out of the intensity of the faith of the early 
Methodists in individual responsibility. " The 
living soul in moral solitude with God " was the 
key-note of their preaching. Wesley used to say 
to his lay preachers: " Remember you have but 



282 My Note-Book. 

one thing to do — to bring the individual soul to 
Christ." 

11. Now, no man can have his own soul set aflame 
with a sense of the responsibility of the individual 
man to a' personal God, of a guilty man to a holy 
God, of a redeemed man to a self-sacrificing God, 
and not preach the ability of man to obey God. 
No matter whether he believes it as dogma or not, 
he will preach it as fact. He will preach it with a 
force of implication which amounts to certainty. 
He may give to it one name or another, or none. 
He may call it " natural ability," as the later Cal- 
vinism of New England does; or " gracious abil- 
ity," as Wesley did ; or no ability at all, as the 
elder Calvinism did 5 he will so preach it that 
awakened hearers will take it in and trust it and 
use it as ahility pure and simple. In a great spir- 
itual reform it will become a power of spiritual 
life in the popular thinking. And this is what 
Methodism made of it. As the groundwork of 
individual responsibility, it has been set home 
to the conscience by the Methodist pulpit with 
an intensity of conviction which has often swept 
everything before it. 

12. Robert Southey says that, of all the hymns 
in the English language, " none are more devoutly 
committed to memory and more frequently repeated 
on death-beds, than certain hymns by Charles 
Wesley." But Methodist Hj^mnology has done a 
broader service than that. When the Methodist 
pulpit has proved the power of men to repent by 



Methodism — its Work and its Ways. 283 

constraining them to act it with tears of godly sor- 
row, then the great congregation has caught it up, 
and, as if moved by the baton of an angel in the 
sky, has echoed and re-echoed it in hymns which 
have borne up the faith of souls in it as on the 
wings of the wind. Where in the comparison are 
our thundering organs and our surpliced boys pos- 
ing in dim cathedrals ; and where our puny quar- 
tettes performing before dumb assemblies ? 

13. For the planting of great Christian truths 
deep in the heart of an awakened people, let us 
have John Wesley's tongue of fire, seconded by 
Charles Wesley's hymns floating heavenward on 
the twilight air from ten thousand Methodist voices. 
Under such conditions Methodism is inspired. To 
know what Methodist voices are under that inspi- 
ration, one must hear them. Mobs, bellowing with 
infuriated blood-thirst, which neither John Wesley's 
coal-black eye, nor Whitefield's imperial voice, 
could quell, have been known to turn and slink 
away when the truth was sung at them in Charles 
Wesley's hymns. Their ringleaders more than 
once broke down in tears and groans of remorse. 
They took the preacher by the hand, and went his 
way with him, arm in arm, swearing by all that is 
holy that not a hair of his head should be touched. 
Thus was Luther's saying verified anew : " The 
devil can stand anything but good music, and that 
makes him roar." 

In this method of transfusion from the faith in 
individual responsibility, faith in man's power to 



284 My Note-Book. 

repent has been in part the soul of every great 
Methodist revival, from the gathering of sixty 
thousand souls at Moorfields down to the last 
autumnal camp-meeting in the forests of Maine. 
Partly by the force of this Methodist intensity in 
the use of it, and partly by its own good sense, it 
has made its way as a living fact into the heart of 
churches whose standards to this day disown it as 
a dogma of speculative belief. 

14. This is a magnificent service, however imper- 
fect and illogical, to the Church universal. Xo 
other truth so vital to spiritual religion has had so 
painful a birth as this of human freedom in the act 
of repentance. Augustine and his predecessors 
paganized Christianity in this respect for a thou- 
sand years. The reformers left the truth substan- 
tially as they found it. Calvinism, as defined in 
the Genevan and Scotch theologies, and in the 
Thirty-Xme Articles of the Anglican Church as 
well, was dead fatalism. The popular mind could 
not logically get anything better from it. The 
offer of salvation, loaded with the doctrine of ina- 
bility, meant no more to multitudes of hearers than 
" Selah " did in the old editions of the Psalms. 
The struggles of the Calvinistic mind to rid itself 
of the incubus have not been a brilliant success. 
Ability to obey God has been sometimes denied 
and affirmed in the same creed. Scores of sermons 
have been made a shuttlecock of it. Forth and back 
and forth again it has been knocked about, till it 
has fallen to the ground through sheer exhaustion 



Methodism — its Work and its Ways. 285 

in the hand which has held the battledoor. Never 
a man has been the wiser. 

15. We have reason to be grateful to any em- 
bodiment of Christian thought, or enterprise, which 
has helped us ever so infirmly to rescue such a truth 
from its tribulations, and restore it to its place as a 
power of spiritual life. The most triumphant way 
of proving any doctrine involved in human duty is 
to use it. Persuade men to act it out by doing 
their duty. Make it thus prove itself as fact, and 
time will take care of it as dogma. This Method- 
ism has done for the doctrine of human freedom, 
through the whole of her splendid history. 

16. The history of the first generation of Meth- 
odism reads like a romance. It reminds one of the 
uprisings in the crusades at the call of Peter the 
Hermit. Wesley inherited from his indomitable 
mother the courage of mediaeval chivalry. Mili- 
tary men recognized in him a born leader. Mobs 
were cowed by the look of his eye. On one occa- 
sion a company of men who had sworn to take his 
life approached a group of his friends, inquiring, 
" Which is he ? " He calmly stepped to the front 
and replied, " I am he." They were awed into 
dead silence. How like to a certain other group, 
who, on a memorable occasion, "went back and 
fell to the ground." That spirit he breathed into 
the whole movement of which his mind was the 
interior spring. He illustrated the saying of a wise 
man, that " God will not have His work made 
manifest by cowards." 



286 My Note-Book. 

17. Methodist enterprise has been adventurous 
in the choice of localities for evangelistic labor. It 
is a notable phenomenon of religious awakenings 
that the leaders develop migratory tastes in the 
extreme. There are no fixed stars among them. 
They seldom have the desire or the faculty for 
stationary labors. Successful evangelists are sel- 
dom successful pastors. Migration has character- 
ized the whole development of Methodism. The 
missions of Wesley and Whitefield to this coun- 
try, when six weeks on the Atlantic made a short 
passage, were examples. Whitefield was on his 
seventh tour in America when he died. Wesley 
travelled in Great Britain, chiefly in the saddle, 
nearly the equivalent of twelve times round the 
globe. In the main, he sought the localities which 
others did not seek, and which commonly did not 
seek him. 

18. From the beginning the aspiration of Meth- 
odism has been to take possession of the ends of 
the earth. Wherever man has gone Methodism 
has gone. It has been emphatically the religion of 
the frontier and the backwoods. In its infancy, cer- 
tainly, whatever may be true now, it did not han- 
ker after metropolitan luxury, nor recoil from the 
privations of colonial exile. Wesley was once 
admonished by the assessors that he had omitted 
to report the amount of his silver-plate for taxa- 
tion. He replied: "My silver-plate consists of two 
spoons and a porridge-bowl, and I shall not pur- 
chase more while my countrymen are suffering for 



Methodism — its Work and its Ways. 287 

the want of bread." We may safely affirm that 
such a man never prayed that the lines might fall 
to him in pleasant places. 

Mr. Hilliard, in his work entitled " Six Months 
in Italy," remarks it as a sign of England's care 
for her honor, and the protection of her subjects, 
that she keeps a man-of-war anchored "within 
twenty-four hours of everywhere." Similar has 
been the spirit of Methodist evangelistic enter- 
prise. Wherever an English or American colony 
migrates, it is very apt to find a Methodist preacher 
within a day's ride of its location, who makes a 
bee-line for it the next morning. The first emi- 
grant wagon-train of considerable size crossing the 
Plains to the Pacific Coast carried a Methodist 
itinerant. This at least has been the genius of 
Methodism. One hears, now and then, lamenta- 
tions in whisper from its despondent fathers that 
the former times were better than these. Of that 
they may speak who know. But historic Method- 
ism is of this adventurous type. This is its idea 
of Christianity. 

19. More signally still has the spirit of conse- 
crated adventure been developed in the choice of 
the classes of society among whom chiefly Method- 
ism has elected to labor. 

One thing we must confess with downcast eye. 
It is the tendency of the great Christian sects to 
lean upon worldly greatness for their prestige. In 
apostolic times Christian assemblies needed the 
admonition respecting the man with " a gold ring 



288 My Note-Book. 

and in goodly apparel." Their successors to-day 
have not outlived the need. They seek prestige 
inordinately from wealth and culture. The philo- 
sophic historian of modern Europe contends that 
44 a certain portion of worldly splendor is requisite 
to maintain even the cause of truth." One of the 
four things for which De Quincey gave thanks in a 
review of his life was that he was 44 the child of a 
magnificent church." Witnesses have borne tes- 
timony before the English Parliament that they 
had 44 never seen a poor man in soiled or tattered 
garments in a church of the Establishment." State 
churches have taken the lead in this corruption, 
but others have not been ashamed to follow, at 
varying distances in their rear. 

20. This drift of denominational affinities is not 
without its palliations. Christianity has a natural 
affiliation with culture, with refinement, with 
learning, with industrial thrift and its rewards. If 
it does not find these, it creates them. It plants 
great cities. It develops expensive tastes. It 
aspires to the noblest and the best in all things. 
It builds "after the similitude of a palace." Its 
ultimate trophies are superlatives. Therefore, to 
desire those things which are the signs of Christ- 
ian civilization at its best is not necessarily a sin. 
To preach the Gospel to those who possess them is 
not a crime. Somebody must do it; why not John 
Wesley, if he can bear the perils of the service ? 
Why not your sect or mine, if power and oppor- 
tunity be given? Said Lord Shaftesbury at a 



Methodism — its Work and its Ways. 289 

foreign missionary meeting in England : " I beg 
you not to forget the rich and noble heathen of 
London, whose souls are starving." 

21. But here is the rub: Christian sects as a 
whole have not borne the temptations of worldly 
aggrandizement with impunity. With many and 
noble individual exceptions, they have succumbed 
to the perils of building Christianity on the very 
highlands which it has itself uplifted. They have 
sought prestige often from souls civilized rather 
than from souls saved. There has sometimes been 
more joy at the parsonage and the vestry over one 
rich man who repented than over the opportunity 
to save the ninety-and-nine who did not repent. 
Has any sect, clergy, age, country, escaped wholly 
this miserable effeminacy? Have we not all suf- 
fered from the taint which it has injected into our 
spiritual life-blood? 

State churches commonly die of this moral 
pycemia. History has not yet proved that, with- 
out reformatory awakenings from outside, and dis- 
ciplinary dislodgements within, a church of Christ 
welded to the State can be saved from sinking into 
a Sybaritic civilization in which the crumpled rose- 
leaf takes all spirit out of her for evangelistic 
enterprise. 

22. Such was in the main the condition of the 
Church of England when Wesley entered her 
priesthood. She was emphatically the church of 
the noble and the gentleman. The masses of the 
poor had forgotten her and been forgotten by her. 



290 My Note-Book. 

At no period of her history had she been more 
fatally entangled in her worldly alliances. Her 
high places were in the gift of immoral statesman, 
and her low places were the rewards of their 
dependents. Churchly livings were sometimes 
given at the solicitation of mistresses. The ma- 
jority of the clergy looked on blinking, and pro- 
fessing to believe that God was well pleased. 

23. Methodism — whatever it may be now — 
was at its birth an intrepid and exasperated revolt 
from that secularized corruption of Christianity. 
Wesley had no prolonged self-conflict about it as 
Luther had respecting the degeneracy of Rome. 
He had no more doubts than he had of the hour 
and the minute of his own conversion. That event 
occurred, as he tells us with artless assurance, " at 
a quarter before nine o'clock on the evening of 
Wednesday, May 24, 1738." The positiveness of 
undoubting conviction was in the make of the man. 
What he saw he believed, and what he believed 
he knew. He expended no mental force on mis- 
givings. 

It was with a whole soul, therefore, that he flung 
himself impetuously against that theory of Christ- 
ianity which made it the sycophant of the great, 
and dependent on them for its place in history. 
He fell back on first principles, and declared that 
it was pre-eminently the religion of the poor. As 
preached by him and his associates, its great suc- 
cesses were among colliers and peasants. Tears 
made gutters down the grimy faces of thousands 



Methodism — its Work and its Ways. 291 

who listened to them in the fields of Cornwall. 
To his theological pupils he said : " Remember 
that you are to give account of God's poor. You 
have no business to be gentlemen " — using the 
word in its technical English sense ; " you have 
no more business to be gentlemen, than you have 
to be dancing-masters." That was the inspiration 
of the Methodist Awakening. 

24. To appreciate the chivalry of this action, we 
should remember that Wesley was himself a gentle- 
man and the son of a gentleman. None but gentle 
blood was in his veins. Through his mother he 
was related to an English earldom. He was a 
priest of the Church of England, and to the day 
of his death he loved her. He was a graduate 
of the most aristocratic of her universities. He 
could not but be proud of his country's history ; 
and, like all Englishmen of his day, proud also of 
her nobility. It was a heroic thing for such a man 
to do to fling the gauntlet over the battlements of 
English caste, and declare to the church of his 
father : " You have been false to your mission as a 
church of Christ." That was a living echo of 
our Lord's words to John the Baptist : " Go and 
tell him that sent you, that the poor have the 
Gospel preached unto them." So nearly identical 
with primitive Christianity was primitive Method- 
ism. 

25. The adventurous spirit of the Methodist 
reformation appears further, in its methods of ap- 
proach to the lowly classes. 



292 My Note-Book. 

Some other sects have offered to the humbler 
orders of society a gospel of condescension; Meth- 
odism has offered them a gospel of equality. Oth- 
ers have treated them with distant and dignified 
beneficence ; Methodism has made friends of them. 
Some others have courteously called to them from 
over the way to repent and be saved — and — and 
— stay where they are ! Methodism has gone 
over to them and taken them by the hand, saying : 
" Come with us ; we have found Christ." Others 
have gathered them into mission churches ; Meth- 
odism has welcomed them to the best she had. 
" Mine are thine," she said. 

26. At the first, Methodist churches were built of 
plain materials and homely architecture, that they 
might seem \iomelike to the multitudes to whom 
aesthetic tastes were in cloud-land. The temple 
outside was in keeping with the worshippers 
inside. For this and other like things in their 
policy, Dr. Johnson — stout aristocrat as he was — 
said that the " Methodists should be commended 
by all men of sense." Why not? As a tempo- 
rary policy, what could have better suited the 
emergency ? What could the colliers of Cornwall 
have made of the refined, philosophic sentiment of 
Coleridge that "a Gothic church is a petrified re- 
ligion " ? Colliers do not want a petrified religion. 
The early Methodists had the good sense to know 
it, and the courage to act upon their knowledge. 

27. We have all of us, according to the knack 
given to us, been " fishers of men." But many of us 



Methodism — its Work and its Ways. 293 

have fished with a pole, and some with a long pole, 
and a few with a very long pole, daintily tapering 
to the end, and quivering with one little fish at 
the bait, while Methodism has fished with the net. 
Methodist faith has seen in the individual soul 
anywhere a possible temple of the Holy Ghost. 
In it He might speak with authority to the wisest. 
She has therefore harkened for His teachings from 
the lips of the ignorant. She has inquired of men 
in coal mines : " What has the Lord done for your 
souls ? " Then she has listened for their answer 
in reverent silence. When it has come, fresh and 
clear from quickened hearts, she has been tolerant 
of ungrammatical speech, and grotesque illustra- 
tion, and aw r kward gesture, and vociferous decla- 
mation, and stentorian prayer, and unconscious 
vanity. She has risked her good name for this 
mission to the lowly. In this, who will venture 
to say that she has not acted with wisdom from on 
high? 

28. True, Methodism has not by any means 
been alone in this exhibition of primitive Christ- 
ianity. No sect has had a monopoly of it. But 
she has been so far eminent in it as to be justly 
called pre-eminent. The gospel of equality, as 
distinct from the gospel of condescension, has 
found in her its elect apostle. And she has had 
her reward. She has Christianized immense multi- 
tudes who, so far as we can judge, would not have 
been saved by any other agency. 

29. A shrewd observer of human faces has said 



294 My Note-Book. 

that every Christian sect has its own physiognomy. 
There is a certain combination of tendencies and 
tastes and qualities, bodily and mental, which for 
the want of a better name we may call a tempera- 
ment, which has responded to the Methodist pulpit 
more genially than to any other. It is a tempera- 
ment largely developed in the English and Ameri- 
can stock of mind. Methodism has saved men of 
its own temperament to Christianity by millions. 
Whole strata of society have thus been penetrated 
by Christian truth. Solid blocks of ignorance and 
depravity have been broken up and turned over to 
the light of Heaven. 

The immaculate Church is yet to be. But with 
all the deficiencies, theological and ecclesiastical 
and liturgical, of the Methodist Church, the Church 
Universal has reason to thank God for her mag- 
nificent history. It has expedited by untold years 
the conversion of the world to Christ. 

30. One other fact should not be forgotten. 
Methodism approximates Romanism, though in 
the far distance, in her obligations to the charac- 
ter of one woman. Of the well-known principle 
that it is the mothers who make great men, the 
humble mistress of the rectory at Epworth is 
perhaps the most illustrious example on record. 
Susanna Wesley, down to the last year of her life, 
— and she lived into the tenth decade, — did much 
to shape the ministry of her sons. The element 
of lay preaching in the Methodist econonry is due 
to the adventurous cast of her mind. Her son 



Methodism — its Work and its Ways. 295 

John was jealous of the innovation. He hastened 
back from Bristol to London to put a stop to it 
in the person of one of his recent converts. On 
his arrival he said, with much discomposure : " I 
hear that Thomas Maxwell has taken to the pul- 
pit." His mother replied : " John, wait ; do noth- 
ing rashly. At first I thought as you do. But I 
have heard Thomas Maxwell preach, and I tell 
you that he has as much right to preach as you 
have." John did wait ; he heard for himself, and 
said : " It is the Lord ; let Him do what seemeth 
Him good ! " Well does Robert Southey say that 
"the mother of the Wesleys was the mother of 
Methodism." 



XII. 

MISCELLANEOUS TOPICS. 

1. The Theatre is older by centuries than the 
Christian pulpit. Both claim to be moral instruc- 
tors of the people. Both have experimented side 
by side, in the same communities, upon the same 
races, surrounded by the same civilizations, and 
both often with the prestige of subsidies by the 
State. The Theatre has had a monopoly -of dra- 
matic literature in its most brilliant accumulations 
for ages. What in the result has the Theatre to 
show in the comparison with its junior rival ? 
What institutions has it founded which are essen- 
tial to human welfare ? A single sermon preached 
by a Welsh divine was the means of founding 
an orphan asylum which still exists. What one 
trophy of its moral power can be found like that 
in the history of the Stage ? The pulpit originated 
the fundamental idea of federal union which was 
wrought into the structure of American liberty 
at the birth of our Republic. For what one such 
idea is the world indebted to the Theatre? By 
their fruits ye shall know them. 

2. Of the conservative and the progressive prin- 
ciples there can be no question which should be 

296 



Miscellaneous Topics. 297 

ascendant in the policy and tastes of a preacher. 
The pulpit is built on a prophecy. The prime 
reason for its existence is the promise that this 
world is to be converted to Jesus Christ. Its chief 
outlook therefore should be upon the future. Yet 
an educated clergy almost inevitably acquire tastes 
which, if not balanced by their opposites, incline 
to conservatism in the extreme. Culture tends 
to passive virtues in character and therefore to 
conservative repression in enterprise. 

3. Intimations abound in the New Testament, 
which indicate a foresight on the part of the 
Apostles, that the religion they brought would be 
a secret germ of revolution in all departments of 
human thought. In the nature of things it could 
not be otherwise. Nothing else penetrates so pro- 
foundly the springs of social action and reaction 
as the moral regeneration of a fallen world. Rev- 
olution is its primal law. Progress is its sign of 
life. 

4. When conservative tastes set themselves 
against the progressive convictions which are the 
natural product of Christian ideas, they produce the 
very evils which conservative minds dread. Con- 
servative repression is the prelude to volcanic 
upheavals. It tends to make progressive opinion 
rabid and reform malign. Reform will always be 
fanatical when religion is stagnant. It was con- 
servatism which crucified Christ. Such is conser- 
vative taste always when it becomes crystallized. 



298 My Note-Book. 

5. One phase of the philosophical argument in 
defence of revivals of religion is seldom appre- 
ciated by their opponents. It is that vast sympa- 
thetic awakenings of men in masses are more 
natural in matters of religion than in any other. 
On no other subject are the interests of men so 
compactly one. The religious nature is the same 
the world over. Its awakenings on the grand 
scale are not dependent on diversities of culture 
or varieties in the scale of civilization. They may 
be of great power and purity in a very dilatory 
state of social progress. 

6. Some errors and abuses will die if we give them 
time to die. We have only to let them alone. 
They will fall to pieces through their own want of 
that adhesive vitality which cements and consoli- 
dates institutions. It is as old as Tacitus, that 
" truth is established by investigation and delay." 
A truism from Goethe is to the same effect that 
" it is not by assaulting the false, but by affirming 
the true, that good is done." A double service to 
truth is rendered, when it is advanced without 
belligerent excitements. Assume that no enemies 
are in sight, and commonly there are none in 
ambush. But they will spring at the sound of 
blows. 

7. It is difficult to say which is productive of 
greater evil, to be a fanatic or to live in morbid 
fear of becoming one. Dr. Chalmers, speaking of 



Miscellaneous Topics. 299 

the charge of morbid agitations against the Meth- 
odists of Scotland, remarks : " I have uniformly 
found that the charge of fanaticism has been most 
vehemently preferred against those men whose 
spirit and whose language came nearest to the 
spirit and phraseology of the Xew Testament." 
To the same effect he observes respecting attempts 
to satisfy those who make the charge : u You can- 
not get the matter accommodated to their tastes, 
until you have made every heart as cold as lead 
and as motionless as a stone." Commonly the real 
state of the case with those who object to religious 
enthusiasm is " not that they would have this done 
rather than that, or that instead of another thing, 
but that they would have nothing done. " We are 
a quiet church " often means, " We are a somno- 
lent church." Large masses of nen, not excited 
about eternal realities, are at war with nature. 

8. The hostility of men to unusual develop- 
ments of religious awakening is commonly a sign 
of their secret faith in such awakenings as the 
work of God. In the act of denouncing, men 
believe. They denounce because they believe. 
Men have no more profound faith than that which 
they hold, or rather which holds them, in a thing 
which rouses their malign passions. 

9. The inherent debility of infidel thinking is 
seen in the paucity of its original ideas. At pres- 
ent, indeed. Christianity supplies its most effective 



300 My Note-Book. 

resources. The superiority of modern warfare upon 
Christian institutions is derived from ideas which 
they have themselves originated. The scepticism 
of our age is in one sense a Christianized system 
of thought. Its root is nourished by a Christian 
soil, and its branches by a Christian atmosphere. 
Such plausible assaults on the Christian faith could 
not have been constructed without appropriating 
some of the practical Christian ideas, yet not 
acknowledging their theoretic origin. That type 
of infidelity, for instance, which builds up a 
system of morality without recognition of a per- 
sonal God, builds up the system which nothing 
else than Christianity could ever have given to 
the w^orld. 

10. Unbelievers in Christianity, above all other 
men, often betray illogical prejudices in giving a 
history of their opinions. Bolingbroke says that 
he was made an infidel by Dr. Manton's commen- 
tary on the 119th Psalm, which his mother com- 
pelled him to read in his boyhood, as a punishment 
for a childish folly. There may have been wiser 
women in her day than Lord Bolingbroke's mother. 
There may have been more exhilarating reading 
for a child than Dr. Manton's commentary. But 
what a confession is this for a bearded man to make 
of the inability of his manhood to outlive a preju- 
dice of his boyhood ! Any opinions held by such a 
man on the subject of religion must have been 
superficially rooted in his moral nature. 



Miscellaneous Topics. 301 

11. How should the Pulpit treat the tendency 
of reform to alliance with Infidelity ? The antag- 
onism between Christianity and infidel reform 
cannot be evaded. The ministry should offer no 
compromise and accept none. History teaches that 
little if any good can be achieved by any work- 
ing alliance between Christian preachers and anti- 
Christian reformers. A preacher is always first a 
Christian, and then a reformer. That order of 
succession should never be reversed. But the 
pulpit should initiate its own reforms, and do it 
seasonably. We should assume that every social 
question which ought to be agitated will be agi- 
tated. The great peril of the ministry is that of 
delay. Preachers are often followers when they 
should have been pioneers. An infidel leadership 
supplants them in their national birthright. Be- 
cause we cannot sacrifice religion to reform we 
should be all the more careful not to sacrifice reform 
to religion. 

12. Christianity, in all its theories and enter- 
prises for the regeneration of society, starts with 
the unit, not with the mass. It does not propose 
to reach the individual through the State, but the 
State through the individual. The profoundest 
depths of our nature do not appear in social rela- 
tions and combinations ; they are in the individual, 
secluded in their working, and incommunicable in 
their results. Reform, technically so called, is 
never the prime object of Christian enterprise. 



302 My Note-Booh. 

From the individual to the family, thence to the 
Church, and ending in the world at large, is the 
line of Christian endeavor for the uplifting of 
the race. 

13. The popular idea of the Puritans as men 
of ascetic and disconsolate conscience has grown 
largely out of the fact that they represented the 
religious reforms of their day. They lived in a 
historic crisis in which extreme conservatism in 
the Church of England developed itself in intense 
worldliness outside. They were the awakened mind 
of the age. They sought to reform the national 
amusements, because those amusements had de- 
generated into immoralities. They were forced 
upon quickened consciences by the laws of the 
realm. Human nature is very apt to discover rea- 
sons for not doing a thing which men are told that 
they must do. When such laws strike athwart con- 
scientious convictions, the reaction becomes reform 
of a very intense and solemn kind. Men make a 
religion out of conscientious resistance to anything 
which is inflicted on conscience by civil law. 

14. It is often observed that great men are sel- 
dom reproduced in their children. A parallel fact 
is that the originators of great popular awakenings 
which mark crises in human progress, seldom trans-, 
mit their own enthusiasm and working force to 
the leaders who succeed them. What Richard 
Cromwell was to Oliver, the second generation of 



Miscellaneous Topic*. 303 

reformers often is to the first. The period of one 
man's working years commonly measures the 
length of time for which such an awakening en- 
dures. Everywhere in the laws of succession 
the sovereignty of decree appears. Great reforms 
create great men for leadership. Grand leadership 
of men is almost never inherited. 

15. It is not becoming in this generation to 
denounce the legislation of our fathers against 
witchcraft, till we are able to affirm some positive 
and reasonable opinions of the phenomena of spirit- 
ualism. The two classes of phenomena belong to 
an unexplored kingdom of either the natural or 
the supernatural. Whatever will explain the one 
will explain the other. We are as ignorant of 
both as our fathers were. We opine that they are 
natural phenomena, but we cannot claim that we 
have proved it till we have discovered the natural 
Cause. They opined that the phenomena were 
supernatural, and apparently they did prove that. 
To the best intelligence of the age they seemed to 
have in the Old Testament explicit authority for 
their convictions and their jurisprudence. The 
witchcraft of the Mosaic age seemed to tally well 
with the abnormal events of their own. They 
were positive men. They were stout believers. 
It would have been too much to expect uf such 
men to sit down in the midst of such scenes with the 
quietude of agnostic indifference. Their convic- 
tions were less discreditable to them than our want 



304 My Note-Book. 

of convictions is to us. Neither witchcraft nor spir- 
itualism is wholly explicable by natural laws then 
or now known to science. It is not yet proved 
that there is not a supernatural residuum of truth 
in both. So long as we are at our wit's end about 
the one, it behooves us to be modest in our judg- 
ments of the theory which the fathers held of the 
other. Whatever else was true or not true of 
them, they were not at their wit's end. To rest in 
an error, on the apparent authority of a revelation 
from Heaven, is a posture of greater dignity than 
to rest in nothing on the authority of either God 
or man. 

16. Probably all men who pray at all, some- 
times pray for a painless death. It is not certain 
that we are wise in this. The moral uses of bodily 
suffering are a mystery, yet not all a mystery. 
What its province may be in "last hours," who 
can tell? Its power to penetrate and fuse hard- 
ened natures may then come to the rescue of 
some who without its benignant discipline could 
not be prepared for spiritual discoveries. It 
should seem that the first disclosures of eternity 
cannot be welcome to one who has no moral tastes 
for their reception. Even the foundation of such 
tastes may not be laid in some natures except by 
the discipline of pain. Nor do we know what 
delicate operations the ministry of pain may set 
going in giving the finishing touches to a saintly 
character. The depth of a mystery is the measure of 



Miscellaneous Topics. 305 

the wisdom which it encloses. Two such enigmas 
as the way in which we come into this world and 
the way in which we leave it, are fitted to make 
us dumb with awe. Wisdom unsearchable must 
be in them ; they are so strange and so painful. 

17. The benevolence which Christianity inspires 
is characterized by five elements. It is intense in 
degree ; it is inventive of expedients ; it is vigilant 
of opportunities ; it is appreciative of remote and 
invisible objects ; and it is capable of studious 
and protracted exertions. The biographer of Sir 
Fowell Buxton says of him : " He walked through 
the world as through the wards of a hospital. He 
had a singular power of realizing to his own mind 
distant and unseen suffering, and on the compas- 
sion which it inspired founding a course of delib- 
erate and sustained action." 

18. Our age is characterized by a degree of 
irreverence which in former times would have 
shocked the same class of minds which now in- 
dulge it, apparently without remorse. Unbelief 
of Christianity was not formerly deemed a sufficient 
reason for ridiculing it in the faith of its humble 
believers. Within the memory of men now liv- 
ing, reticence respecting one's own disbelief of the 
Scriptures was regarded as the sign of a gentleman. 
Is it so now ? One of our most popular essayists 
says that he " can conceive of Rabelais as going 
into convulsions of laughter at the folly of Satan 



306 My Note-Booh 

waging war with God." Something less deserving 
of respect than either wit or humor prompted the 
remark. Cicero displayed a finer taste and more 
healthy conscience in observing that " enormous 
wickedness is never esteemed ridiculous." 

19. The evangelizing of the negro race in Amer- 
ica is one of the exigent enterprises which will not 
bear to be left to the ordinary average of Christian 
progress. They cannot wait for its accomplish- 
ment. The white race cannot afford to make 
them wait. The work, if done at all, must in the 
interest of both races be done with speed. Several 
facts emphasize this view. 

20. One is that the present religious condition of 
the freedmen, if not speedily improved, threatens 
a relapse towards barbarism. They have a religion 
which is called Christian, but among large numbers 
of them it is infected with that virus which dooms 
all corruptions of Christianity to decay, — the alien- 
ation of religion from morality. Many church 
members among them are equally glib of tongue in 
praying and in lying. They bless the Lord in the 
very act of larceny. They make much of baptism 
and little of the marriage vow. Said one to a mis- 
sionary teacher, who reproved him for adultery: 
"I've been dipped, sir." Poor sufferers for the 
sins of others ! Slavery, that providential " mis- 
sionary institution " of which we used to hear so 
much, has confounded in their minds the first prin- 
ciples of Christian living. 



Miscellaneous Topics. 307 

Exceptions to this picture are of course numer- 
ous. In some localities the picture itself may be 
exceptional, and a purer type of piety the rule. 
But, from the somewhat conflicting testimony of 
eye-witnesses, one is compelled to infer that, taking 
the religion of the field-negroes into account, the 
barbaric elements are altogether too potent for the 
perpetuity of the Christian faith. 

21. Moreover, the most disheartening feature 
of the case is that the type of Christianity which 
prevails among the "poor whites" around and 
above them is no better. The immoralities of 
Christian negroes they have copied from the supe- 
rior race. They are an imitative people. They 
have inherited the habit of looking upon every- 
thing white as superior to anything black. One 
poor negress of queenly head and figure, when 
told that a sculptor would carve a bust of her as a 
representative of her race, was overjoyed to tears 
by the assurance that it would be in white marble. 
Not the distinction of the bust, but the color of 
the material, was the thing which overwhelmed 
her. The very vices of white men look respectable 
by the side of black virtues. A poor quadroon 
girl esteems it an honor to be the mistress of a white 
man. And the marvel of horrors is that in some 
instances her mother trains her so. 

Such is the material from which our religion 
must select its representatives among the freed- 
men. Slavery has poisoned the whole religious 
atmosphere of the South. The classes low down 



308 My Note-Book. 

in the social scale have breathed the miasma in its 
most virulent precipitate. 

22. Such a religion in either white or black 
cannot fairly be called the religion of a civilized 
race. It cannot long remain as it is; it must give 
place to something better or worse in no long time. 
Christianity is indignantly intolerant of its own 
corruptions. It is nauseated by them and spews 
them out, or its life-blood is poisoned by them and 
its own fevered and infuriated energy goes into 
them and dies with them. That nominally Christ- 
ian people is in a woful plight whose religion is 
their ruin. Yet this is the doom which threatens 
the colored race at the South, if left to themselves, 
with no other regenerative influences than those 
which they have inherited and which are germane 
to the soil. 

23. The exigency of the enterprise appears fur- 
ther in the prospect of extensive changes in the 
character of Southern labor. Hitherto the freed- 
men have been chiefly agricultural laborers. They 
have lived in the open air, under the bland and 
morally healthful influences of green fields, and 
blue skies, and forests, and the songs of birds. 
Agricultural labor everywhere is humanizing. So 
far it is auxiliary to Christianity in its unconscious 
sway over the character of a docile people. It is 
congenial especially with the refined and passive 
graces which it is so difficult to engraft upon 
uncultured mind. 

But what is to be the future of Southern labor ? 



Miscellaneous Topics. 309 

Those who have the best means of judging tell us 
that it is to be largely revolutionized. The subter- 
ranean resources of the South are to be developed. 
Her magnificent water-power is to be put to the 
service of human industries. In some States the 
cotton-field is to yield precedence to the factory, 
and the forge, and the mine. Georgia already 
takes rank among the great manufacturing States 
of the Republic. It is reported that some of her 
fabrics compete successfully with the same from 
the looms of Massachusetts. The amount of cap- 
ital invested in manufacturing and mining enter- 
prises of the South was augmented in a single year 
by fifty-two millions of dollars. This indicates no 
fragmentary or transient development of new 
industries. 

24. It is not difficult to forecast the effect of 
this change in the conditions of Southern labor on 
the character of the laborer. He must pass out 
from the humanizing sway of agriculture, and 
come under the indurating influences of toil in 
heated workshops, and furnaces, and coal pits, and 
iron mines. All history declares that when labor 
retires from the open air and is shut in within four 
walls, or buried underground, it becomes more 
gross and barbarizing in its influence on the laborer. 
His mind becomes less receptive of religious ideas. 
His sensibilities are less responsive to their disci- 
pline. He is more prone to infidel thinking, and 
more easily dominated by atheistic leaders. In 
social crises he is more readily swept away by 



310 My Note-Booh. 

malign excitements. In New England, the hot- 
beds of infidelity among the artisan classes are the 
shoeshops. In Old England Atheism is nowhere 
else so deeply rooted as in the factories of Bir- 
mingham and Manchester. 

25. The changes referred to in Southern indus- 
tries tend, therefore, the wrong way in their prob- 
able influence on negro character. They must 
render his spiritual regeneration more difficult. 
They must complicate it with political and social 
problems, the agitation of which by an injured race 
cannot be friendly to the best type of Christian 
manhood. Fifty years hence Christian enterprise 
may find in the laboring elements of Southern 
society the most unmanageable extremes of com- 
munistic infidelity. The savagery of Africa may 
be found to have run through the life-blood of ser- 
vile generations, to reappear at last in a more fero- 
cious, because a more knowing, hostility to the 
religion of the superior race. The evil may be 
redoubled by the animal fecundity of the negro, 
which he has in common with all servile races, 
and which may treble and quadruple the numbers 
of his class. 

26. Mr. Cable, in one of his admirable essays on 
the Silent South, speaks of the new industries of 
Birmingham, Alabama. He writes : " It was fine 
to see the crude ore . . . turned into one of the 
prime factors of the world's wealth. But another 
thought came with this, at the sight of dark, 
brawny men moving here and there, with the wild 



Miscellaneous Topics. 311 

glare of molten cinder and liquid metal falling 
upon their black faces and reeking forms. They 
were no longer simple husbandmen, companions 
of unfretted Nature." This is a hint of the change 
which every philosophic observer foresees coming 
upon the laboring class of the South in thousands 
upon thousands. 

27. What we do, therefore, for their uplifting 
into a purer Christian life should be done now. 
The work should be crowded with all possible 
speed. We should prosecute it as men gather in 
their ripe harvests when a thunder-storm lowers in 
the horizon. Humanly speaking, the chances of 
its success will never be greater ; the obstacles to 
it will never be less. 

28. Another critical feature in the exigency 
arises from the fact that, in the person of the 
freedman, Republican government in many of the 
* )uthern States is practically suspended. 

We have given suffrage to the negro; but the 
I dot in his hands is too often waste-paper. Wher- 
e ^r his vote would affect the issue of an election, 
hx understands that he deposits it at the risk of his 
li' Minorities have silenced majorities. Most 
sij ificantly does Mr. Cable speak of "the Silent 
Sc h." Silence is it, like that of a man whose 
ejt joks into the barrel of a burglar's revolver. 

L In such a condition of things, two questions 
cor s unbidden to every thoughtful observer. One 
is, xlow long can the Republic stand such a 
glaring outrage upon its first principles of consti- 



312 My Note-Book. 

tutional law ? The other is, How long will six 
millions of an injured race bear the humiliation of 
such enormous wrong ? 

30. The problem is complicated by the fact 
that the Southern whites are obeying irrepressible 
instincts. What is it that has kept us of the 
North in a state of acquiescent silence in the face 
of political revolution ? Why do we look through 
our fingers on this violence which has thrust down 
majorities and sent minorities to the top? The 
reason is the silent conviction that the Southern 
whites are acting naturally. Immeasurable as the 
wrong is, it is not an unnatural wrong. It would 
be an anomaly, unknown in civil history, if they 
acted otherwise. 

Let us face this thing as it is, and commit no 
pharisaic impertinence by arrogating to ourselves 
superior virtue. It is very easy to thresh the mis- 
deeds of other men. But the fact is, in this case, 
that Massachusetts or Connecticut would do the 
same thing under the same conditions. Not in the 
same way, but in ways constitutional and decorous, 
the end would be made sure, that the servile race 
should not lord it over the master race. It is 
expecting too much of human nature to turn the 
whole framework of society upside down and com- 
mand it to remain so. Man is not made to walk 
on his head. Neither is civilized society so consti- 
tuted that ignorance and vulgarity and thriftless 
poverty can assume dominion over intelligence and 
culture and wealth and historic pride and — keep 



Miscellaneous Topics. 313 

it. Only standing armies from outside can long 
hold the government of great States, with a proud 
history behind them, in the hand of the servile 
race over the master race. To administer govern- 
ment in such a bouleversement, you must station a 
soldier with fixed bayonet at every man's door. 
Even then, government would be law against 
nature. In such an antagonism, law would stand 
no chance. Law or no law, the reactionary somer- 
sault must come. The body politic must spring 
again into its natural posture, and stand on its feet 
with head erect and eyes looking straight on. 

31. The anomaly here indicated has been the re- 
sult of our policy of reconstruction. I do not say that 
it was the fault of either race, but it surely was the 
misfortune of both races, that the liberty of the 
slave did not grow. It came leaping from the can- 
non's mouth. Citizenship did not come to him by 
his own act; it was imposed from outside. He 
did not take it with his own right hand ; it was 
put into his left hand from behind. Everybody 
knew that he was not fit for it, but nobody knew 
what else to do. It was the forlorn necessity of 
the crisis. The gift, therefore, carried with it none 
of the dignity and the consciousness of power to 
use and to defend it which belong to a liberty and 
a citizenship which are the growth of time, and of 
political training by great events, and of deter- 
mined self-assertion. In the nature of things, it 
could not be that five millions of a servile people 
should come into the right of free citizenship in 



314 My Note-Booh. 

such a left-handed way, without loading the politi- 
cal system growing out of the revolution, with 
anomalies in law and contradictions in practice. 
We never strike Nature a blow without feeling a 
return blow. So we find it. 

32. But what has all this to do with the evangel- 
izing of the negro ? Just this — that the evangel- 
izing of the negro opens the only way out of the 
perilous imbroglio of Southern government. We 
have but one thing to do, to save the Republic to 
either race. It is to take the freedman as he is, 
and make him a citizen in character as he is in law. 
He must be educated up to the level of his politi- 
cal rights by an intelligent discharge of his politi- 
cal duties. Thus, and not otherwise, can he acquire 
the power to appreciate those rights and to defend 
them. Let him share in the intelligence and the 
culture and the industrial thrift of the white race, 
in proportion to his capacity, and in the same pro- 
portion he will share with them in the government 
of States. His rights will be his when he takes 
them by force of character ; never till then. Char- 
acter will then take the place of color as the badge 
of distinction, and honor will crown worth. We 
need not be greatly disturbed by the vows of South- 
ern whites, that they will not permit the freedman 
to have the right of suffrage. Thinking men will 
do what they must do. 

33. But to achieve this we must work at the 
religious end of the enterprise. The theory of 
missions has become a science. One of its axioms 



Miscellaneous Topics. 315 

is that civilization is a sequence, not an antecedent, 
of evangelization. The most facile way to uplift 
men to the level of civil freedom is first to Christ- 
ianize them. A robust type of Christianity must 
supplant the diseased and crippled nondescript 
which they have now. Then the gifts and graces 
of an advanced civilization will follow. 

This work has been magnificently begun. Few 
enterprises of the American Church have so much 
to show in results for twenty years of labor. But 
it has now reached a point of complication with 
Southern politics and industries at which it needs 
to be expedited with all possible speed. Republi- 
can freedom degenerates rapidly with disuse of 
republican principles. Half-civilized natures rap- 
idly grow sullen and revengeful under the burning 
sense of injustice. The safety of both races from 
internecine conflict depends on the quick working 
of spiritual remedies. We have no time to lose. 
It will not do to prosecute the work conveniently. 
We cannot afford to prosecute it with conservative 
dignity. Mr. Cable strikes the keynote of Christ- 
ian as well as of political endeavor when he reads 
the exhortation of conservative wisdom with a new 
emphasis. He writes : " Make haste slowly." 

34. In ancient Egypt, the chief concern of a 
man's life was preparation for his burial. The 
chief ambition of a sovereign was to build his tomb. 
Of mechanic arts, masonry and embalming were 
the most honorable — the one to build a resting- 



316 My Note-Book. 

place for a corpse, and the other to delay its disso- 
lution. Usages of society, the names of streets, 
anniversary customs, were suggestive first of the 
death-scene and the grave. Diodorus Siculus says : 
" The Egyptians call the dwellings of the living 
' lodgings,' because they are only occupied for a 
short time. The tombs they call 4 eternal houses,' 
because the occupants never left them." 

Egyptian life is an emblem of the whole world's 
thinking upon death. Less demonstratively, and 
for the most part secretly, men are all embalmers 
and undertakers. Arts now lost were employed in 
the construction of the pyramids, but the world has 
not lost the thought which built them. No other 
thought has ever gained such absolutely universal 
sway over the human mind. 

35. Critics of Shakespeare have observed the 
fact that there is not to be found in his dramas a 
solitary line expressive of even so much as a philo- 
sophical toleration of the prospect of death. The 
only feeling respecting it which he has put into the 
mouths of men is that of passionate abhorrence. 
In " Measure for Measure," Claudio, appealing to 
his sister, is made to say : — 

" The weariest and most loathed worldly life 
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment 
Can lay on nature, is a paradise 
To what we fear of death ! " 

This is the conception of the " myriad-minded " 
poet, who is thought to have conceived more pro- 
foundly and variously than any other man the 



Miscellaneous Topics. 317 

inner life of the human soul. In this respect 
Shakespeare was not a Christian. He seems to 
have known nothing of the light with which Christ- 
ianity has illumined the grave. 

36. The unnaturalness of death in the system 
of things is symbolized by the sympathy of the 
brute creation with man's antipathy to it and 
dread of its coming. An ox will low mournfully 
over the pool of blood from the veins of its kin. 
The poor dumb being finds in the phenomenon 
the same tragic mystery that we do. He protests 
against it as a thing which is at war with Nature. 

37. " That man lies," said the Duke of Welling- 
ton, u who says that he never feared to die." 
Marshall Montluc of the French army acknowl- 
edged that he was often overcome with fear in 
battle, and could not get possession of himself till 
he had said a prayer. I once asked a soldier of 
the Army of the Potomac if he supposed that the 
men of the rank and file ever prayed ? "I believe," 
said he, "that every man of us did when we went 
into action." 

In presence of such testimony, when Sweden- 
borg tells us that Charles the Twelfth of Sweden 
did not know what that is which we call fear, we 
must be permitted to shrug our shoulders. Proba- 
bly the certainty of coming dissolution causes 
more of suppressed dejection than any and all 
other facts in the experience of men. It raises 
with more oppressive doubt the question, " Is a life 
worth living which must have such an ending?" 



318 My Note-Booh. 

38. We need a certain military element in our 
mental conquest of death. No other fear balances 
it among all human forebodings. Faith in a risen 
and ascended Christ should be such as to enable 
us to fling off our natural horror, as we do a tangled 
and terrific dream on awaking. Such was one of 
the martial virtues of St. Paul. Probably few 
men have ever lived, though trained -at the can- 
non's mouth, who really cared so little about dying 
as he did. Yet he does not seem to have raised 
himself to meet it by the dead lift of will or in 
shame at secret fears. He lived in the military 
state of victory over its terrors. All that he has 
to say of it has the ring of sovereignty. It was 
the natural sequence of his faith in our Lord's 
resurrection. 

39. In the popular notions of death, it is doubt- 
ful whether the Christian or the pagan element 
predominates. The dying words of Rabelais were : 
" I am going to meet the great Perhaps." What 
is this but the " If" inscribed on the portals of the 
temple of Delphi? Have two thousand years of 
Christian culture done nothing for us, that we 
must now go back to pagan oracles ? Yet is there 
not much in our funeral usages and accompani- 
ments which Socrates would have deemed un- 
worthy of an ancient Spartan ? 

40. In some respects the first Christian ages 
were not superior to ours ; but in their concep- 
tions of death they were so. Our belief in immor- 
tality is more philosophical than theirs ; theirs 



Miscellaneous Topics. 319 

was more Christian than ours. The resurrection 
of Christ was to them the one stupendous fact of 
all time. It gave to death a new meaning and 
clothed it with new associations in human thought. 
The original significance of it as the exponent of 
sin and of God's displeasure was blotted out. A 
new conception of it was introduced into Christian 
Hymnology. The catacombs to-day bear witness 
that that event wrought a revolution in Christian 
thought which illumined the whole heavens. No 
other revolution in history can bear comparison 
with this in the metamorphosis wrought by it in 
the popular ideas of the end of this life and the 
promise of another. When did ever any other 
religion create a literature in which death-songs 
were so jubilant and triumphant? 

41. The analogies of Nature are in league with 
revelation in its contradiction of our pagan notions 
of dying. They teach that the passage to another 
life must in the natural order of things be a tran- 
sition to a higher and a nobler life. Things super- 
annuated and effete are forerunners of things 
nascent and young. One thing passes away that 
a better thing may be. Species give place to 
superior species. Evolution is upward. Such is 
the latest and grandest faith of science. 

This law of an ascending grade in the evolution 
of Nature is but the type of the law of resurrection 
and ascension in spiritual destiny. Terrestrial 
bodies are the precursors of bodies celestial. The 
new being is a nobler being. New faculties open 



320 My Note-Book. 

upon new researches. Discovery springs to new 
opportunities. The spirit of the man goeth up- 
ward. The comparative reticence of revelation 
on the subject is the most suggestive thing we 
know of it. It hints at unutterable possibilities. 
It encloses inconceivable certainties. Eye hath 
not seen nor ear heard them. 

42. The dread of death must in the nature of 
things be most oppressive in a materialistic age. 
This is a magnificent world. A man must have 
had a very sad life in it, who would not be con- 
tent, under existing conditions, to abide here for- 
ever. Add to its material resources the attach- 
ment which habit creates, and you have bonds 
almost invincible, to bind us all to its exceeding 
loveliness. This world is home. A materialistic 
faith has nothing to give us which can balance 
the grim fact that we must leave it, and go — 
whither ? 

The well-known remark of Dr. Johnson to 
Garrick who was showing off his splendid house 
and grounds : " Ah ! David, these are the things 
that make death terrible ! " has probably found its 
way in substance to the mind of every man whose 
life has been successful, as the world counts suc- 
cess. 

Christianity is worth believing, were it for noth- 
ing else than its revelation of an antidote to the 
fact of death. And its glory is that it discloses a 
world of spiritual resources of which this world, 
with all its resplendent beauty and home-likeness, 



Miscellaneous Topics. 321 

is but a remote and inadequate emblem. In the 
Christian theory of life the chief use of this world 
is to be a symbol of the world to come. 

43. In those phenomena of Nature which confirm 
the teachings of revelation respecting another life, 
the condescension of God has been marvellously 
considerate of human weakness. The most im- 
pressive of the natural emblems of resurrection 
from the grave are not locked up in recondite 
realms of science. They are not a treasure of 
learning only. He has written them in the com- 
monest phenomena which a child may interpret. 
Why is the sunrise a diurnal spectacle ? Is it not 
in part to give us every morning a resplendent 
symbol of the resurrection of the dead? Why is 
sleep made a daily necessity to the recuperation of 
life ? Is it not partly that we may realize to our 
imagination the waking from the grave? Why 
are the alternations of summer and winter so 
faithful ? Is it not that the springtime may give 
us proclamation, as from other worlds, of the 
reality of another life ? The moral uses of these 
natural phenomena poetry has interpreted more 
appreciatively often than religious faith. 

44. Does real life discover any basis for that 
negation of a Divine providence which affirms the 
existence of " lucky " and " unlucky " men in their 
vocations ? John Jacob Astor is reported to have 
said : " I never have anything to do with unlucky 
men. I have known clever men, very clever men, 



322 My Note-Book. 

who have no shoes to their feet. I fight shy of 
them." 

One thing is patent on the face of this theory. 
The moral argument is against it. It is the theory 
of concentrated, Satanic selfishness. The maxims 
of commerce contain nothing more malevolent 
within the circle of ideas which respectable men 
dare to profess. We are safe in spewing it out of 
a Christian civilization, as offensive to God and 
man. 

45. The facts of life, when thoroughly investi- 
gated, falsify the theory. The very large majority 
of the " unlucky men " are such by reason of some 
maladjustment of faculty to vocation. They are 
the victims of unwise choices. Men enter a pro- 
fession who ought to learn a trade. Men engage 
in commerce who ought to be tillers of the soil. 
For sanitary reasons, some can succeed in nothing 
without life in the open air. Multitudes of men 
are born with aspirations above their abilities. 
They have the tastes of leadership without the 
power to lead. Sons follow the employments of 
their fathers, without the pluck and self-discipline 
of the fathers. They insist on beginning where 
their fathers left off. Innumerable are these malad- 
aptations of men to things. Multitudes of men 
therefore belong to Sydney Smith's classification 
of round men in square holes, and square men in 
round holes. 

46. Further, men are often "unlucky" through 
neglect of their ante-natal history. They do not 



Miscellaneous Topics 323 

inquire what is the vocation which the blood runs 
to. No man can fit himself for conspicuous suc- 
cess in an employment to which he has no pro- 
clivities inherited. A man must be born to some- 
thing, to make a great success of anything. 

47. Many of the defeated men represent their 
family stock at the period when it is caving in. 
This is the destiny, sooner or later, of all families. 
Rarely does eminent ability descend beyond the 
third generation. The remote descendants of an 
illustrious ancestry are apt to be as illustrious for 
their incompetence. They should have descended 
with the family stock gracefully. They should 
have chosen humbler callings. Often the son of a 
Senator should have been a clerk in the Post 
Office. The grandson of a Chief Justice should 
make shoes. The son of a millionnaire must often 
be a book-keeper in the palatial store in which his 
father made the fortune that the son has lost. 
The ancestral line always, sooner or later, runs on 
an inclined plane. He that is wise will discover 
this seasonably, and make the best of it gracefully. 

48. Multiform are these failures of faculty to 
interlock with birth and circumstance and time 
and opportunity. It is as unphilosophical as it is 
irreverent to charge the failures of unsuccessful men 
upon the disabilities or the ill-will of Providence. 
Yet this is the folly and the crime which are covered 
under a flippant name in the theory of " ill-luck." 
It is not necessary that all men should achieve 
what the w^orld calls success. A descent in life 



324 My Note-Book. 

from the higher to a lower plane is often a 
nobler fortune than the reverse. The material 
decline is a spiritual ascent. Alas ! how often is 
it better to enter another world halt and maimed 
by the defeated wrestlings of this world ! He is 
the wise man who, under life's failures, enters into 
God's silence and waits there. 



Typography by J. S. Cushing & Co., Boston. 
Presswork by Berwick & Smith, Boston. 



PROFESSOR AUSTIN PHELPS' 

ESSAYS AND STUDIES. 



MY NOTE-BOOK : Fragmentary Studies in 
Theology and Subjects Adjacent Thereto. 

i vol., 121T10, with a Portrait, $1.50. 

Contents: Fragmentary Studies in Theology. — The Personality 
of a Preacher. — The Materials of Sermons. — Methods and Adjuncts of 
the Pulpit. — Conscience and Its Allies. — Our Sacred Books. — Theistic 
and Christian Types of Religious Life. — The Future of Christianity. — 
Methodism : Its Work and Ways. — Miscellaneous Topics. 

A peculiar interest attaches to these studies in the fact 
that almost the last act of Dr. Phelps' life was in connection 
with his preparations for their publication. In the Preface 
to the volume he says : " By far the major part of every 
man's thinking is fragmentary. The best thinking of some 
men is so. They are seers of transient and disconnected 
vision. An educated man who practices literary frugality 
in preserving the ideas suggested by his reading, will find 
after years of professional service an accumulation of them, 
in which he will recognize some of the most robust products 
of his brain. .... These remarks are suggested by 
the origin and resources of the present volume. It is 
literally what its title indicates." 

MY STUDY AND OTHER ESSAYS. 1 vol., 

i2mo, $1.50. 

Contents : My Study. — Vibratory Progress in Religious Beliefs. — 
Oscillations of Faith in Future Retribution. — Retribution in Its Biblical 
Atmosphere. — St. Paul on Retribution. — Correctives of Popular Faith in 
Retribution. — Retribution in the Light of Reason. — Endless Sin Under 



Professor Phelps' Books. 



the Government of God. — The Hypothesis of a Second Probation. — 
Scholastic Theories of Inspiration. — The New England Clergy and the 
Anti-Slavery Reform. — Massachusetts and the Quakers. — Does the 
World Move ? — Is the Christian Life Worth Living ? — A Study of the 
Episcopal Church. — Prayer as a State of Christian Living. — Why Do I 
Believe Christianity To Be a Revelation from God ? 

" Whatever Phelps writes is worth reading and preserving. Each of the essays of 
this volume bears the unmistakable mark of his thought and style. Nearly every 
paragraph betrays the touch of a master. In vigor, in richness of thought, as well as 
in neatness and clearness of style, these essays are almost incomparable. "' 

— The Lutheran Observer. 

MY PORTFOLIO: A Collection of Essays. 

i vol., i2mo, $1.50. 

Contents : A Pastor of the Last Generation. — The Rights of 
Believers in Ancient Creeds. — The Biblical Doctrine of Retribution. — 
The Puritan Theory of Amusements. — The Christian Theory of Amuse- 
ments. — Is Card-Playing a Christian Amusement ? — The Question of 
Sunday Cars. — Worn an -Suffrage as Judged by the Working of Negro- 
Suffrage. — Reform in the Political Status of Women. — The Length of 
Sermons. — The Calvinistic Theory of Preaching. — The Theology of "The 
Marble Faun/' — The Debt of the Nation to New England. — Ought the 
Pulpit to Ignore Spiritualism ? — How Shall the Pulpit Treat Spiritual- 
ism ? — Foreign and Home Missions as Seen by Candidates for the 
Ministry. — Foreign Missions, Their Range of Appeal for Missionaries 
Limited. — Congregationalists and Presbyterians : A Plea for Union. — 
Methods of Union. — The Preaching of Albert Barnes. — A Vacation with 
Dr. Bushnell. — Prayer Viewed in the Light of the Christian Conscious- 
ness. — Intercessory Prayer. — Hints Auxiliary to Faith in Prayer. — The 
Vision of Christ. — The Cross in the Door. — The Premature Closing of a 
Life's Work. — What Do We Know of the Heavenly Life ? 

M To say that sound wisdom, broad and exact learning, profound spirituality and 
practical adaptation to current needs are all blended in these essays, and are rendered 
the more impressive by a literary style of such purity and force as seldom are illustrated 
by any one author, is to say only what is familiar already to everybody who has read 
anything from Prof. Phelps' pen. Such a volume is a substantial addition to that lit- 
erature which, by broadening and strengthening the true foundation of belief and 
character, is 'preparing the way of the Lord' upon earth." — Congregaiionalist . 



Professor Phelps' Books. 



MEN AND BOOKS : or Studies in Homiletics. 

Lectures introductory to " The Theory of Preach- 
ing." One vol., crown, 8vo, $2.00. 

Professor Phelps' second volume of lectures is more popular and 
general in its application than "The Theory of Preaching." It is de- 
voted to a discussion of the sources of culture and power in the profes- 
sion of the pulpit, its power to absorb and appropriate to its own uses 
the world of real life in the present, and the world of the past, as it 
lives in books. 

"It is a book obviously free from all padding. It is a live book, animated as well 
as sound and instructive, in which conventionalities are brushed aside, and the author 
goes straight to the marrow of the subject. No minister can read it without being 
waked up to a higher conception of the possibilities of his calling." 

— Professor George P. Fisher . 

" It is one of the most helpful books in the interest of self-culture that has ever 
been written. While specially intended for young clergymen, it is almost equally 
well adapted for students in all the liberal professions." — Standard of the Cross. 

" We are sure that no minister or candidate for the ministry can read it without 
profit. It is a tonic for one's mind to read a book so laden with thought and sugges- 
tion, and written in a style so fresh, strong and bracing." — Boston Watchman. 

ENGLISH STYLE IN PUBLIC DISCOURSE. 

With Special Relation to the Usages of the Pulpit. 

I21TQO, $2.00. 

English Style is broad and comprehensive, and is particularly fasci- 
nating from its stores of happy illustrations and its frequent discussions 
of matters that everyone is interested in, but which few are competent 
to decide for themselves. By far the greater part of the volume relates 
to English style in its widest acceptation, and the entire work is a most 
valuable contribution to the subject. 

" It would be difficult to match this book for practical value and literary merit in 
the English language." — The Evangelist. 

"This volume may be read, and not only read, but studied, with much profit by 
everyone who has occasion to speak in public or to write for the public. . . . We 
have here a treatise on pulpit style broad enough to be that and something more — a 
satisfactory treatise on all English style. It will be a great help to any who are 
striving to learn how to write and speak their mother-tongue with precision, force and 
grace." — The Examiner. 



Professor Phelps' Books. 



THE THEORY OF PREACHING: Lectures 
on Homiletics. By Professor Austin Phelps, D.D. 
One volume, 8vo, 600 pages, $2.50. 

This work is the growth of more than thirty years' practical ex- 
perience in teaching, reinforced by suggestions arising from inquiries of 
students, which feature is especially to be noted as giving an intensely 
practical and living character to the discussion. It is probably the most 
thorough and masterly treatment of the preacher's art that exists, cer- 
tainly as adapted for the American pulpit it is unequalled. While pri- 
marily designed for professional readers, it will be found to contain 
much that will be of interest to thoughtful laymen. The writings of a 
master of style and of broad and catholic mind are always fascinating ; in 
the present case the wealth of appropriate and pointed illustration ren- 
ders this doubly the case. 



CRITICAL NOTICES. 

"In the range of Protestant homiletical literature, we venture to affirm that its 
equal cannot be found for a conscientious, scholarly, and exhaustive treatment of the 
theory and practice of preaching. . . . To the treatment of his subject Dr. 
Phelps brings such qualifications as very few men now living possess. His is one of 
those delicate and sensitive natures which are instinctively critical, and yet full of 
what Matthew Arnold happily calls sweet reasonableness. . . . To this character- 
istic graciousness of nature Dr. Phelps adds a style which is preeminently adapted to 
his special work. It is nervous, epigrammatic, and racy." 

— The Examiner and Chronicle. 

"It is a wise, spirited, practical and devout treatise upon a topic of the utmost 
consequence to pastors and people alike, and to the salvation of mankind. It is 
elaborate, but not redundant, rich in the fruits of experience, yet thoroughly timely 
and current, and it easily takes the very first rank among volumes of its class." 

— The Congregationalist. 

" The volume is to be commended to young men as a superb example of the art in 
which it aims to instruct them." — The Independent. 

" The reading of it is a mental tonic. The preacher cannot but feel often his heart 
burning within him under its influence. We could wish it might be in the hands of 
every theological student and of every pastor." — The Watchman. 



*#* For sale by all booksellers, or sent, post-paid, upon receipt of 
price, by 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Publishers, 
743 and 745 Broadway, New York. 



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